Never delivers the full potential of its concept.
Imagine a movie, aimed at the teen and millennial audience, that captures the zeitgeist of social media and the obsession with internet celebrity. Mix that with a touch of YA genre movies such as The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner with a splash of David Fincher’s The Game and that sounds potentially cool, right? Now, imagine it’s directed by the father of one of the target audience who wants desperately to be cool and set it to a dime-store knockoff blend of the Tron Legacy and Drive soundtracks. That, crushingly disappointingly, is Nerve.
The film focuses on Venus Delmonico, a high school senior, played by Emma Roberts. She’s the boring, studious one in her group of friends – she’s into photography, is awkward with boys and wears jeans, sneakers and a hoodie so she must be, right? Emily, played by Emily Meade, is the exciting leader of the group – she doesn’t wear a bra, she flashes her butt at a school football game etc – and she’s, like, super popular on an online game Nerve where people do dares for money. In Nerve, you’re either a Watcher, you set dares and watch people do them, or a Player, one of the people who take on challenges and increase in risk and value. Venus, or Vee for short because it’s soooo edgy, decides to prove that she’s not so dull and starts playing.
Her first dare is to kiss a random guy in a diner and that guy turns out to be Ian, played by Dave Franco, who is also a Player. He’s then dared to sing to her, the audience likes them together and soon they are paired up and on the road together doing dares and taking huge risks. Soon we realize he’s not all he seems and, aside from the potentially life-threatening challenges, if there's something darker at play here. They have to win the game to escape the game but at what cost? The most dangerous thing in the whole movie is probably the dialogue which is, at times, borderline criminal.
Nerve visually reads like a checklist of stereotypes and clichés from dialogue, where things like the use of drones and the use of terms like Dark Web are thrown around clumsily like candy from a piñata, to the way characters are dressed, looking like a window display for a textbook new wave hipster alt-kid in a Hot Topic window display. The use, or overuse, of neon and faux-retro, edgy graphics and the like grates and feels fake and off. It wants to be a cross between the love child of The Game and The Hunger Games for the streaming generation but it doesn’t work (but it does make New York look good as their playground).
Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, the team behind the brilliant Catfish documentary as well as the third and fourth Paranormal Activity movies, have previously handled reveals and tension with skill, or at the very least embraced clichés and used them to their benefit, but here they fail.
There are moments, glimpses, that hint at the potential and promise that could have been but they are too few and far between. The cast is underserved across story, execution and characterization leaving the leads and supporting cast such as Meade, Juliette Lewis, Miles Heizer, Kimiko Glenn and Machine Gun Kelly doing what they can with what they’ve got.
Nerve is based on a novel from 2012, which will seem like a lifetime ago to the target audience, and it already feels as dated as an iPhone 5 - it’s not even an iPhone 5S. It will probably age badly and quickly, which at least means that it might eventually develop kitsch/camp/cult status. Nerve just about limps into the so-bad-it’s-almost-fun camp, but I can’t, hand on my heart, recommend it unless you really have nothing better to do.
The Verdict
Although fun and very almost fun at times, the majority of Nerve feels ham-fisted, contrived and limp. There’s a great idea here and an important message, but it fails to live up to its promise or deliver on the full potential of its concept in almost every way.
Editors' Choice
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