Nerve (2016)
Directed by Henry Joost
Industrious high school senior Vee Delmonico has had it with living life on the sidelines. When pressured by friends to join the popular online game Nerve, Vee decides to sign up for just one dare in what seems like harmless fun. But as she finds herself caught up in the thrill of the adrenaline-fueled competition partnered with a mysterious stranger, the game begins to take a sinister turn with increasingly dangerous acts, leading her into a high stakes finale that will determine her entire future.
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Clarity and tact have gotten the hell out of Dodge, stranding stars Emma Roberts (FOX’s “Scream Queens”) and Dave Franco (“ Neighbors ”) in a narrative ghost town whose currency is implausibility and where the only television around is playing a loop of David Fincher’s “The Game” (arguably the director’s worst film).
It’s like an update of the 1997 David Fincher thriller “The Game,” only with an ominous hint of this is where the world is heading! that feels more like “The Purge.”
The title refers to a new app that all of the most popular kids in school can’t stop talking about — an augmented reality contest that’s essentially a cross between “Periscope,” “Pokémon Go,” and David Fincher’s “The Game.”
Schulman and Joost’s new techno-thriller Nerve ingeniously reinvents The Game for the age of Snapchat and Periscope, with the corporate nefariousness of David Fincher’s film replaced by dark-web hackers and peer-to-peer voyeurs and sadists.
The game gets as big as The Game and the dark web that runs it is as easily accessible as The Net.
Schulman and Joost’s latest collaboration, the teen thriller Nerve, throws little bits of The Purge and David Fincher’s The Game into the current trends of social media virality and augmented reality games, and the film surprisingly hits more often than it misses.
It’s a game called Nerve that operates through a smartphone app — though it could just as well have been devised by a savvy TV producer who loved “Fear Factor” and “The Hunger Games” and ordered up a show that was a cross between them.
This silly, ultimately completely square tale, based on a YA novel by Jeanne Ryan, apparently wants to be an urban version of “The Hunger Games” but fails miserably.
Everything about the third act proves preposterous, including a ludicrous arena showdown obviously meant to evoke the bread-and-circuses theme of The Hunger Games.
And for all of its “of-the-moment-ness,” this film brims with High School Movie Cliches and borrows just a tad here and there from other (and much better) action thrillers, from “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” to “The Hunger Games.”
Earlier films such as The Hunger Games (and its precursor, 2000’s Battle Royale), 2009’s Gamer, 1987’s The Running Man and 1975’s Rollerball reverberate – but here, the puppet master pulling the strings isn’t some overarching corporate villain.
“Nerve” isn’t on the same scale as “The Hunger Games,” but has a similar theme in the way a larger force exploits and manipulates teenagers, as they’re watched by a crowd that cheers and jeers.
Meanwhile, Ty executes a dangerous stunt that recalls the R-rated Disney film from 1993, "The Program," and the tragic real-life copycat accident that forced Disney to cut the scene in question from that film.
This is familiar territory for anyone who has seen 13 Beloved, its American remake 13 Sins, or E.L. Katz’s spectacular 2013 debut, Cheap Thrills, though comparing Nerve to any of these is unfair because it is fundamentally different on a molecular level: It’s a post-Social Network movie combined with YA tropes, where everyone equipped with a smartphone is represented with graphic captions that jut into New York’s skyline like neon flagpoles.
That it's all been done before in films like "Series 7: The Contenders," "Cheap Thrills," "Would You Rather," "The Den" and "Unfriended" with a climax lifted from "The Hunger Games," makes it all the more difficult to find much of interest here.
Sort of a teen-friendly combination of Crank, The Game, Unfriended, The Running Man, and the highly underappreciated indie gut-punch Cheap Thrills, Nerve is about a high-tech internet game in which average Joes and Janes agree to do all sorts of crazy “dares” in return for an escalating series of bank deposits.
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And, let’s face it, in five years this movie will be as outdated as Sandra Bullock’s “The Net.”
The game gets as big as The Game and the dark web that runs it is as easily accessible as The Net.
So observed Roger Ebert upon the release of The Net, almost 20 years to the day before that of the social media thriller Nerve.
Earlier films such as The Hunger Games (and its precursor, 2000’s Battle Royale), 2009’s Gamer, 1987’s The Running Man and 1975’s Rollerball reverberate – but here, the puppet master pulling the strings isn’t some overarching corporate villain.
Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (who helmed the third and fourth installments of the “Paranormal Activity” franchise as well as “Catfish,” the supposed documentary about the dangers of social networking), along with editors Madeleine Gavin and Jeff McEvoy, simply aren’t able to keep much of what’s happening clear, and the result is lots of incoherence punctuated by Vee’s strident sermonizing, a catastrophic combination.
It’s not for nothing that they were tasked to direct the third and fourth Paranormal Activity movies, adding to a franchise that turned record profits off vid-cam minimalism and a hashtag.
Their contributions to the “Paranormal Activity” franchise stand out due to a dynamic use of lo-fi camera tricks, and “Nerve” — for all of its salient points about how anonymity has turned the internet into a place where people seldom take responsibility for their actions — is most effective as a visceral thrill-ride.
Using cellphone video (players have to record their dares on their own cameras) and the kind of headlong videos you see in a GoPro demonstration, Joost and Schulman, who directed "Catfish" and a couple of the "Paranormal Activity" movies, crank up the tension.
Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman are the directors behind Catfish and two of the later Paranormal Activity movies, so they have plenty of experience with online deception and the horrors of constant surveillance.
Nerve is co-directed by Paranormal Activity veterans Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost.
This is familiar territory for anyone who has seen 13 Beloved, its American remake 13 Sins, or E.L. Katz’s spectacular 2013 debut, Cheap Thrills, though comparing Nerve to any of these is unfair because it is fundamentally different on a molecular level: It’s a post-Social Network movie combined with YA tropes, where everyone equipped with a smartphone is represented with graphic captions that jut into New York’s skyline like neon flagpoles.
NERVE plays like an adolescent version of it, although it apparently has a number of predecessors including a Thai horror movie “13: Game of Death,” its American remake “13 Sins,” and Jeanne Ryan’s original novel “Nerve.”
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No todas son absolutamente innovadoras (se perciben referencia a Al filo de la muerte o 13: Game of Death) y, lamentablemente, varias se resuelven de manera un poco torpe o con moralejas tranquilizadoras, pero la película de Henry Joost y Ariel Schulman sintoniza bastante bien con las adicciones, angustias y falta de contención de los adolescentes de hoy.
NERVE plays like an adolescent version of it, although it apparently has a number of predecessors including a Thai horror movie “13: Game of Death,” its American remake “13 Sins,” and Jeanne Ryan’s original novel “Nerve.”
Nerve is refreshing and frustrating in equal measures, mining a genuinely inventive concept for some memorable, Mean Girls-esque pathos about the ways in which the Internet is changing and magnifying social structures for young people today.
Lacking sufficient edge to attract older audiences – the types who go for Ring, Scream or even Mean Girls – this is set for the 12 and 13 year-old crowd and younger, with an eye to exploiting Roberts’ Scream Queens cachet.
But what evolves is pretty much a “Mean Girls”-type of scenario in which a couple of teenagers compete to see — you guessed it —who can become more popular.