Nerve

Synopsis: High school senior Vee Delmonico (Emma Roberts) is tired of living life in the shadow of her best friend Sydney (Emily Meade). Pressured by Sydney and most of her other friends, Vee signs up to Nerve, a popular online game that challenges players to accept a series of dares. Despite the misgivings of Tommy (Miles Heizer) her one friend who thinks it’s a bad idea,Vee takes up the first challenge to kiss a stranger. The stranger is Ian (Dave Franco) who turns out to be another Nerve player and it's not long before the two of them are caught up in the adrenaline-fueled competition that requires them to perform increasingly dangerous stunts. But Ian might not be who he seems to be and when Nerve takes a sinister turn, Vee finds herself in a high-stakes finale where the stakes are life or death.

With so many people obsessed with Pokémon Go at the moment, there’s a little touch of the zeitgeist about this internet thriller that sees New York City transformed into a virtual arena for escalating challenges driven by the anonymous watchers who steer but don’t actually participate in the game. It’s an interesting premise, reminiscent of David Fincher’s 1997 thriller, The Game but, unfortunately, the realisation falls way short of the idea’s potential.

Partly it’s the writing. Jessica Sharzer’s screenplay is based on the 2012 novel by Jeanne Ryan and it tends to devote most of its attention to the surface of the story, failing to provide any real depth into our understanding of the characters or what the game has to say about this generation and the extent to which online anonymity might promote anti-social or extreme behaviour. But mostly it’s the uninspiring direction. It’s all gloss, frenetic camera work and thumping soundtrack. But the film’s worst sin is that it’s just pretty silly and the longer it goes on the sillier it gets until we find ourselves at an ending which is contrived, simplistic and ultimately meaningless.

Emma Roberts (daughter of Eric and niece of Julia) is well suited to her stints in things like the hit TV show American Horror Story but she doesn’t really have the presence to carry a story, even one this slim, on the big screen. Franco has a bit more charisma (we saw him earlier this year in Now You See Me 2) but there’s not a lot happening between the two of them and so the care factor for whether or not Ian will betray Vee is pretty low. The rest of the cast provide the usual array of archetypal teenage friends but the real surprise is Juliette Lewis as Vee’s mother who is almost completely wasted in a role that requires her to stand around a lot and fret.

Granted there is some fun to be had when Vee and Ian accept the dare to try on ridiculously expensive clothes in a high end fashion store and then have to sneak out in their underwear, and there’s plenty of nail-biting tension when Vee has to walk across a ladder laid between two windows on opposite sides of a very tall apartment building but in the absence of any real character development and without a strong story to bind such scenes together, the whole affair winds up feeling a lot like watching someone else play a video game – it’s a bit remote and the stakes for the viewer aren’t particularly high.  

ps. If you’re quick, you’ll catch a little visual reference to Dave Franco’s more famous brother James in the opening scene. I’m not sure why it’s there, but it’s obviously not by accident.

 

 

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