In Nerve, the newest social media app has teens scrambling to perform crowd-elected dares for money. These dares range from kissing a stranger to jumping into fires - the harder the dare, the bigger the payout. Emma Roberts plays Vee, a shy high-school senior whose wild-child best friend Sydney (Emily Meade) is growing her Nerve following. Tired of living in Syd's shadow, Vee decides to play, and when she teams up with another mysterious Player named Ian (Dave Franco), they embark on the wildest PG-13 rated night of their lives.
The movie's a neon-blasted amalgamation of The Matrix, The Brass Teapot, and The Hunger Games. Really, the problem is, this is too familiar. I've seen 20-somethings pose as teens; I've seen the shy girl "go bad" when she meets the cool guy; I've seen the boy friend (note the space) get jealous of said cool guy. Add this to technophobic portrayals of voyeuristic teens celebrating idiocy and borderline sadism, and you've got a DOOMSday scenario from the old whining about these long-haired hippies and their Livestreams.
Once logged in, the app combs through every piece of Vee's information: social media, college applications, even bank accounts. As Vee completes dares, the money's instantly hardwired into her account, something that raises suspicions in her mom (Juliette Lewis in a post-Jem and the Holograms world). The fear of no privacy is easy to establish. We never know the identity of the game's creator - I want the alternate ending to be Bugs Bunny saying "Ain't I a stinker?!" The movie goes so far as to debunk the "Shut down the server!" complaint by saying since the game is open source, everyone's phone is a server. Add in a subplot about the "Dark Web," which in a PG-13 movie, consists of an unfinished webpage with pictures of butts and random pills, and there's just enough to shut a 13-year-old up and make yours truly, at 23, laugh his ass off.
The actors do well with the material, though the difference between the leads and supporting cast is apparent. There's a sitcom's cadence to many in the later camp. I don't worry for the fate of the characters because this is PG-13 danger, but if they were written more three-dimensionally, I'd be sucked in. Not the case here. Like many teen ensembles, they're written only thin enough to set up each stereotype.
Forgive an aside: there's a scene right before the climax where Vee does a difficult, but doable dare that lands her in the top of the Nerve scoreboard, even when another player undergoes a potentially bloody and violent affair. I'm not entirely sure if the amount of money one receives for a dare is decided on by the Watchers or Hacker Supreme/God/Agent Smith, but they need to get their properties straight.
Nerve has an audience; if you skew younger on the "young adult" scale, and you're not as familiar with teen movie plots, you'll find stuff to like here. The New York skyline is as beautiful as ever, and I'm always a sucker for neon. But there's little brains to the scenario and when we eventually get the message (literally) preached to us, I burst into laughter. An after-school special this doesn't need to be.
Thank you all for reading. I'm the Man Without a Plan, signing off.
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