Nerve (15, 96 mins, ★★)
As a teenage boy growing up in the 1990s I was duty-bound to love The Word, Channel 4’s deliriously profane Friday night show. Amid the noisy bands and drunken guests, there was a section called “The Hopefuls”, which involved a member of the public doing something disgusting such as eating their own toenails (actually one of the tamer examples), followed by them speaking the immortal words: “I’d do anything to get on TV.”
Nerve drags “The Hopefuls” format – unknowingly, I assume – into the digital age. Based on the novel for young adults by Jeanne Ryan, it tells the story of an uptight teenager called Vee who gets drawn into an online game, Nerve, that splits players into “watchers” and “players”. Nerve players must record themselves doing dares suggested by the watchers in return for cash and “likes”. As the players progress through the game, the dares become increasingly outrageous: not so much “I’d do anything to get on TV” as “I’d do anything to improve my social media profile”.
For Vee, played with gusto by Emma Roberts, the road to online fame is far from simple. On the one hand, she has to negotiate a partnership with one of her fellow players (a motorcycle-riding hunk called Ian, played by Dave Franco) and, on the other, the jealousy of her best mate Sydney (Emily Meade), the previous queen of Nerve.
The film raises plenty of compelling questions about the increasingly all-consuming nature of our digital world, online anonymity and the blurring of the lines between virtual reality and real life. The premise of the spiralling danger of online dares is also undeniably fertile dramatic ground – yet directing duo Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman fail to fulfil any of this potential.
Nerve is quite clearly aimed at a young crowd, and so unnecessary soap operatics, including a shouty row between Sydney and Vee at a house party, are allowed far more space in the drama than is necessary and, despite the tension ratcheting up with some vertigo-inducing dares, there is nowhere near enough grittiness or genuine horror to help the film transcend its teen-novel foundations.
The hasty, muddled and moralistic denouement in which Vee and Ian are forced to face off in a gun battle, sees Joost and Schulman completely lose the modicum of control they had on proceedings up to that point.
The Hunger Games adaptations, particularly the opening instalment, showed how young adult fiction can be translated into cinema that appeals across age spectrums. Unfortunately, Nerve is nothing but a pale imitation.
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