Nerve-An Honest Review

The 2016 thriller was directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schuman and written by Jessica Scharzer. Nerve is the story of Vee ( Emma Roberts ) a girl who’d rather not leave her comfort zone, who stumbles upon, what could best be described as “Evil YouTube”.

PLOT:
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

After getting a recommendation from her friend, Sydney ( Emily Meade ) Vee joins Nerve, an app based around dares, some of which being harmless fun, others make you think “How is this thing legal?”. The app let’s people pick between two categories, ‘player’ or ‘viewer’. As a player, your job is to livestream obscure challenges, provided to you by mystery people. Upon completion, you recieve the presviously offered sum of money. Note; nobody is forced to accept a challenge, it’s always voluntary. Viewers meanwhile, are simply well, viewers. They pay a fee then watch what the players do, they leave comments, yeah basically YouTube.

Pretty much immediatly after completing her first task, she meets Sam ( Dave Franco ), a fellow player, whose willing to take a lot more risks then she is.

Together, they do a series of tasks, each getting more dangerous, and more rewarding in cash value. Most noteably one requiring the two to drive a motorcycle at 60mph while blindfolded, and yes, they’re stupid enough to go through with it and survive. Throughout this time, Vee gets a rival, Ty ( Machine Gun Kelly ) the arrogant punk type, who randomly gets sprinkled in throughout the film. Because of her literal overnight sucess, becoming much more popular than her friend, Sydney, it quickl, shattery their friendship.

The film concludes at an arena. Vee and Sam both in front of an audience of hundreds of people, along with thousands, maybd milliony more watching over the app. The Nerve app telling them to shoot each other. Sam telling Vee to shoot him, she can’t do it. A masked man, revaes himself to be Ty. He offers to shoot Sam for Vee, which would make him the winner of the challenge. After rallying up the crowd, he fires. Just not at Sam, instead he shoots at Vee. The crowd leaves, but it turns out, he didn’t actually shoot her. The whole thing was staged. Sam and Vee now never having to worry about Nerve again. The End.

CONCLUSION:
Despite the characters having basically zero characterization, the film was alright. Not a masterpiece, not a film I’d want to rewatch, but I can’t trash it, nor can I say there was nothing going for it. At the very least the movie had a decent, original concept to it. One problem I have with this film, is that somehow, despite the app seemingly being as popular as Pokemon Go was at the time, someway, somehow it has no hit the police’s radar. Don’t ask how. I’d give this film a 5/10.

-The Screenwriter

PS, happy birthday to Tom Felton