K-SCORE: 55
Director: Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman
Writer: Jessica Sharzer
Based on: Nerve by Jeanne Ryan
Starring: Emma Roberts, The Young Master Franco, Juliette Lewis, Samira Wiley, Miles Heizer, and of course, Machine Gun Kelly
Spoiler Level: Major
Really Nerve? Why do you have to make it so goddamn easy for me? They’re just painting concentric red and white circles on their own faces and handing me firearms at this point. They’re standing at the edge of a cliff, looking stupidly at the horizon with “Kick Me” signs stapled to their backs.
Nerve describes itself as “Like truth or dare but without the truth.” Read: “Like a stupid adolescent game but stupider.” That’s the premise right from the start. And as for the execution, well not that it’s not amazing but I did have some questions, could raise some issues.
So in Nerve, characters played by Emma Roberts and The Young Master Franco sign up voluntarily for a mobile app that sends them anonymous dares to do supposedly increasingly outrageous things. The app apparently has access to your bank account and will direct deposit money when you complete dares and film them for the “watchers.” Emma Robert’s character, who, like all YA protagonists must have a stupid name and a simple nickname, Venus, aka V, receives $100 fairly near the beginning for kissing a total stranger. The man she chooses, an attractive guy, about her age, sitting alone in a diner reading To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. So, yeah, there’s like a 97% chance he’s gay. She gets lucky though, and not only does he not seem to be gay, he’s super into her, playing the game too so understands her actions so she’s not that embarrassed, and is actually intimately familiar with the game. This guy, Sam, inexplicably using the fake name Ian, tells her that if she fails a dare, she loses all the money she made from the previous dares she completed. I got to be honest, I think it’s a little disingenuous of the software engineers to claim that you’ve made $100 or $200 or $500 or $2500 or whatever, if they’re just going to take it all away unless you “win the game,” which they don’t tell you how to do. Spoiler alert: it involves some light… murder. Meanwhile, V’s braless friend is flashing her ass at pep rallies and farting on strangers, getting more and more jealous that Venus de Mild Misdemeanor is sucking face with homos and riding motorcycles in an adultless Manhattan, apparently attracting the attention of a bunch of internet trolls.
“clothing they just had on has teleported to The Young Master Franco’s motorcycle”
And, again, not that Nerve isn’t amazing, but I did feel this is where the app gets a little rapey. I should mention, this thing has no interface. It just pops messages in neon colors on your phone that have a short, usually ambiguous instructions for the players. The escalation of dares tells V to try on a dress that costs $4000 while The Young Master Franco puts on a 1950s butler’s outfit he’ll end up wearing for most of the rest of the film. Then the app tells a different guy, the tattooed creeper known only as Ty, played by Machine Gun Kelly (God, I wish my parents had named me Machine Gun. Machine Gun Blackburn.), to steal the clothes of the two leads while they’re messing around in the department store. Then they have to leave the store in their underwear while thousands of people watch them film themselves on their cell phones. Well, they started out real classy. When they get out, the clothing they just had on has teleported to The Young Master Franco’s motorcycle and they spend the rest of the film doing dangerous things Black Tie Only Option. They also receive notifications that they have more cashy washy in their bank accounts.
“about the economics of the game...”
Okay okay okay, let me back this up a bit. Not that Nerve isn’t amazing, but, here’s where I felt the rules of the game were really drawn into question. Supposedly, at this point, V had made like $3300 and acquired a $4000 dress for which they made a weird point of showing us they had the receipt. Even if the app claims to take away all the money as soon as they “fail or bail,” she could have just returned the dress, resold it, gotten store credit, and had a haul for the night that would be considered lucrative by the standards of high-priced prostitutes. Better yet, transfer all the money to a different account or buy stock online or order gold bars from one of those companies that advertises on Fox News. Plenty of ways to handle that. This issue of V’s finances really made me wonder about the economics of the game. It makes the claim that Watchers pay $20 a day to watch the players do their dares, and, I guess, a lot of people signed up for that, though I’m wondering why. V, armed only with a desire to prove her best friend wrong, that she’s not a boring girl, was able to make like 7 grand in a couple hours by doing a few semi embarrassing things. Who is turning that down to drop a $20 on the ability to see shitty self-shot iphone videos of live content you can find better alternatives for on YouTube? V’s performance thus far also drew into question the issue of game managers. Someone has to confirm that the dares get completed and come up with new ones. That person or those people are so adept at that that they are able to coordinate dares between various players to creating interesting interactions between those people that developed a lot of followers.
And forget about it. They’ve moved on and V is on the back of The Young Master Franco’s motorcycle and he has decided to stick a bumper sticker that says “New York Fucking City” to his visor and drive 60mph down 5th avenue. Not that Nerve isn’t amazing, but why the hell would he do that? Even if he was driven by an uncontrollable desire or self-assessed necessity to complete the dares from the anonymous game designers, why would he choose that location and that methodology? So they had like an 80% chance of dying but are fine because of the navigational skills of V, who’s apparently pretty mediocre at the game Red Light Green Light. Meanwhile Skanosaurus Rex is at a party where V’s projected onto a flatscreen because Sony chipped in some cash for this furiously cut montage of insanity, gets jealous, gets drunk, and climbs out of a window. As she’s struggling to do that, V and The Young Master Franco are cuddling on a carousel (the man loves carousels) talking about dead teenagers in between bouts of tongue tag.
At this point the film is aching for answers to anything at all and so of course it launches into some premise changes, character motivation changes, and a complete tonal shift. What was rapey is now downright post-apocalyptic. All the world’s a voyeur, V, Franco, and Machine Gun Subway Stuntman the only players. They go back to the party real quick to yell at their friends, jump out a window, and then get into a fight amongst themselves. V tells a cop, “I’m playing an online game of truth or dare,” and so, of course, he responds with a firm, “I don’t care.” Naturally that means Machine Gun Machismo punches V in the face and locks her in a shipping crate. The Young Master Franco is right around the corner and now they’re all going to die or one of them is and the only way to stop it is to get the black skinny lesbian from Orange is the New Black to hack into the game and turn the tables on all the insidious Watchers that are now hungry for blood.
“V and Co. attend some kind of ritualistic murder circle / The Purge cosplay party”
And not that Nerve isn’t amazing, but it’s possible it started to go a little off the handle here. V and Co. attend some kind of ritualistic murder circle / The Purge cosplay party and starts Russel Crowing the audience of skull-faced goons that paid good money to watching their shitty iphone videos. Demanding to know, “Is this not why you are here? Are you not entertained?” Machine Gun Preacher shoots V in the chest while her Mom watches on Twitch. Kappa, FeelsBadMan. The Young Master Franco cradles V’s lifeless corpse, weirdly devoid of any injury, and weeps as everyone who voted to see the pretty girl bite the bullet receives a message saying they’re now an accessory to murder. So they kind of frown at their screens and walk away. Then V gets up and it was all a big psyche, she’s fine, it was the only way to beat the game. Can you be an accessory to a fake attempted homicide by being a YesBoi on a StrawPoll? Oh, and by the way, the lesbian master hacker fixed all those money problems too.
So, not that Nerve isn’t amazing, but this summary really draws into focus some of the weirder choices made by the film. Would you believe it if I told you V has a dead brother. He’s not tied to anything, just good old fashioned dead. And there’s even the scene right from the cliche checklist where she walks around his old room sadly. It’s like they put him in just so I could joke to Graham as soon as the scene started, “Dead brother. Got it. Cut away. Don’t care.” And they did! They did cut away! Would you believe it if I said that the whole film started with V lusting after some guy from her high school who never becomes relevant in any way? Well he’s in there. My first instinct upon seeing this doofus was to cringe and say, “Eek. That’s a face for radio.” And better than either of those two plot protuberances is the addition of the best friend guy character who’s going through some unrequited love problems with V. He drives around and tracks her as she does her dares, telling her she should quit, and later asks the black girl hacker for help. He’s intimately familiar with The Dark Net. And not that Nerve’s not amazing, but they had the giant gaping plot problem of an app that has no mastermind engineer and needs one, weirdly obsessed with one girl from Staten Island, and a computer whiz kid, also obsessed with that girl, who desperately needs a purpose in the story. Puzzle piece it together, people. This is Narrative 101 shit.
Yeah, Nerve is amazing. I was impressed. Really though I can’t figure out why they’d opt for a PG-13 style in what is a distinctly sexual and violent premise. Don’t they know their audience? Actually, do I? Sarcasm can’t be a primary draw, can it? Either way, it inspired me to come up with not one but two terms for subgrenres / types of films that I’ve noticed have been trending in the last decade of cinema. The first is: Thoughtless Cutfest. A Thoughtless Cutfest is a film that uses edits incredibly rapidly for the purpose of getting you to not think about what you just saw because any entry level analysis will reveal the severe ineptitude on the part of the filmmakers. Second I’ve got for you: A Nick and Nora New York Nightmare. That’s any film that takes place in New York, but a version New York where apparently parents, or really adults of any kind, are mysteriously absent. Don’t get me wrong, New York City is a urban hell and twisted cityscape of filth and irresponsibility but one thing it’s not missing is people.
By the way, if you don’t have ninety minutes to watch Nerve, you can just watch this music video starring Emma Roberts and The Young Master Franco. Same plot. Be sure to catch the carousel cameo towards the end of the second act. Man that guy loves carousels.
This is what they're all looking at. Obviously only The Young Master Franco is excited.