Oh, Millennials…
You never cease to be the poster children of pure, undiluted stupidity. If you aren’t busy spending your parents’ hard-earned money on Kardashian apps or getting hit by cars while playing Pokémon Go, you’re downloading an iPhone game that demands your fingerprints and personal information so anonymous strangers on the internet can dare you to do life-threatening things for cash. What could possibly go wrong? “Stupid people playing stupid games winning stupid prizes” should have been the official tagline. And that brings us to Nerve.
We open with Emma Roberts as Vee, a high-school senior who looks about five years too old for the role. Vee spends her days applying to expensive liberal-arts colleges, Skype-chatting with friends she doesn’t particularly like, and getting her world news from the Huffington Post. In other words, she’s every generic “smart but boring” teenager Hollywood has been writing for the last decade. One day she receives an invite to a mysterious online game called Nerve. Players can choose to be either a Watcher (people who pay to watch others do dangerous stunts) or a Player (the ones actually performing the stunts for money). Any person with half a functioning brain would close the browser and wipe their history immediately. Vee, however, is not that person. Her entire character arc is that she’s a sheltered, boring teenager who hasn’t “lived” yet and needs to break out of her shell.
Some might suggest that a little thing called “college” would be the safer place to do that living, but that would make far too much sense for this movie. After watching her “friend” Sydney flash the internet for cash, Vee decides that jumping into a completely unregulated dare game run by anonymous people is a fantastic idea. From there she’s taken for the ride of her very short, very dumb life.If you are over the age of 22, Nerve is not for you. You will almost certainly walk out hating teenagers even more than you already do. The motivation for every character to keep playing is pure vanity and the promise of easy money. It’s nearly impossible to feel sympathy for any of them because every single red flag is waved in their faces and they ignore all of them.
The film name-drops the “Dark Web” as the shadowy place where this game supposedly lives—home to hackers, criminals, and every twisted activity your mind can invent. A game that encourages increasingly dangerous public acts, cannot be traced or shut down, and requires full access to your personal data should set off every alarm bell imaginable. But kids will be kids, right?Vee soon pairs up with a cute fellow Player played by Dave Franco. Together they start climbing the ranks, completing wild public dares in hopes of reaching the finals of a game that, conveniently, no one has ever actually won. Nerve plays out like a live-action video game: big set-piece challenges, side missions, and an ever-rising difficulty curve. You’re probably asking the obvious question—why doesn’t anyone just call the police? Because “snitching” lands you in the game’s secret third category: Prisoner.
Once you’re a Prisoner, the game uses all the personal information you willingly handed over and forces you to keep playing against your will until you either win or, presumably, die.The ending tries (and fails) to make a grand statement about internet culture and how it’s ruined society. The problem is that the dialogue is so blunt and self-important that a premise this ridiculous can’t support the weight. It comes off less like social commentary and more like an insult—especially since every character on screen is guilty of exactly the behavior the movie is supposedly criticizing.
Nerve is poorly written and aimed squarely at an audience too young or too distracted to call it out. Visually there are a few striking set pieces and the directors (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman of Catfish and Paranormal Activity fame) know how to stage a tense sequence. What they don’t have is a smart enough script to back any of it up. Plot-induced stupidity is the real engine of the story, and you can only lean on teenage naivety for so long before the whole thing collapses under its own absurdity.
Emma Roberts never quite sells the “shy, inexperienced girl” routine, and Dave Franco has done far better work elsewhere. The central idea—an anonymous, escalating dare game with real-world consequences—had the potential to be a sharp, nasty little thriller in the hands of a better writer. Instead we get a dumb teen action movie that does nothing to improve the reputation of teenagers, New Yorkers, hackers, or modern society as a whole.
Ninety-six minutes of pretty people doing dumb things for imaginary points and real danger. Exactly as brainless as it sounds.
1/5
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