Nerve Official Trailer2:30
Emma Roberts and Dave Franco star in the new movie Nerve "Are you a watcher or a player?"
Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s teen thriller Nerve bungles the ending
NERVE (M)
Directors: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman
Starring: Emma Roberts, Dave Franco, Juliette Lewis, Emily Meade, Miles Heizer.
Rating: 2.5 / 5
Shows plenty of it, then loses all of it
The new teen thriller Nerve immediately gets our attention by showing us a near-future where Pokémon GO is no longer the hottest thing in live online gaming.
That can only be a good thing, right? In a few ways, yes. But in so many more ways, hell no.
The film takes its title from an app-based tournament where young, dumb and fearless players (of which low-wattage stars Emma Roberts and Dave Franco are the only two you’ll recognise) do whatever their smartphones tell them to.
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Without getting too exact, the Nerve app generates an ever-escalating series of dares. With each feat completed, a cash prize is deposited in your bank account. As the game expands, the dares get more dangerous, and the money on offer gets bigger.
If you don’t chicken out and can stick around until the finals to do something truly death-defying, then you could be setting yourself up for life. Unless, umm, you die.
It is a very attractive storytelling hook, and the movie’s co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (the same mischief-makers behind the Catfish movie and TV show) have no trouble persuading their audience to initially take the bait.
Courtesy of its strong start, Nerve generates a surprising amount of dramatic momentum that carries it well past the one-hour mark with few problems in evidence.
However, Joost and Schulman badly bungle the closing act with an ending that is either a cop-out that was forced upon them, or a brain-fade that hit them both at once.
Seriously, with each “big” reveal jackhammered one after the other into the last scenes, Nerve just gets smaller and smaller in your estimation.
