Sure, sure, sure, maaaaaybe it would have been nice to post this review back when the movie was in theaters. If you’re into that sort of thing, but why be so predictable as all that?
What Works: The movie is about a virtual game of “Dare” (there’s very little truth) where people offer you money to do increasingly outlandish things, and the way the game is set up is more than believable enough to give the movie an extra kick, like you could be watching the future. Emma Roberts plays a good-girl who’s a little tired of cleaning up her showier friend’s messes, and decides to live as a Daredevil inside the game one night where she meets Dave Franco’s ambiguous male player.
For a long while the movie works by tweaking things we think we know. Like the fact Emma Roberts will probably play a jaded bad girl (here she seems freed of playing the Mean Girl We Know Will Die in “Scream Queens” or “American Horror Story”) but instead plays a cyber-punk Cinderella here and who would have thought Dave Franco (too often a washed-out mensch like in the “Neighbors” movies) could seem a likely seducer of Roberts instead of the other way around? And in the movie’s middle-sequences, the game’s thrills do as good a job as any movie this year of putting you inside the best aspects of being a teenager, that potentially life-ending danger that feels almost romantic.
What Doesn’t: Sure, what goes up, must come down. And—of course—the game has a dark side, and an ending that is necessary (about the dangers of a bloodthirsty internet culture) also feels a little like a comedown from what’s come before it. Still, it would be irresponsible to have a full-length movie showing what fun it is to do crazy, potentially-fatal things for money without at least some token acknowledgment of the dangers.
What I Would Have Done Differently: “Nerve” is a tricky movie to really change because most of what really works about it—the dangerous thrill of being 17 and knowing all your dreams can come true or kill you in a single night—isn’t stuff you can just have undiluted by a non-moralizing ending. You wouldn’t really want a droves of teens to leave the theaters and blindfold themselves on a motorcycle, but part of the movie’s fun is in thinking you juuuust might can get away with it.