'NERVE' REVIEW.....WE WORKED UP ENOUGH NERVE TO WATCH 'NERVE'

NERVE (2016),way out of our demographic, is a movie someone as old as BQ has no business looking at....a breathless plunge into the frenzied world of Millennial social media....you know, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook,Texting,  Snapchat, yada yada. But we love watching everything equally,so we dove head first into this thriller directed, appropriately by the "Catfish" guys. ("Catfish" being the documentary and subsequent MTV show in which hapless internet surfers discover that the loves of their lives, who fashioned on-line personas as beautiful, young, excitingly gorgeous people, are in fact, 87 year old bald cross dressers or something similar.....let the internet buyer beware....)

"Nerve" imagines an omnipotent powerful website, a la "Facebook", that generates vast profits by daring high schoolers to post videos of themselves as they attempt death-defying stunts....and reap instant deposits into their bank accounts if they succeed without injuring or killing themselves.  Yes, we asked the same question out loud that you would.....which is, aren't there already hundreds of thousands of foolhardy souls posting videos of themselves engaging in potentially lethal stunts? And doing it free of charge, for the pure joy of an adrenalin rush and more Youtube clicks?

Ah well, you just have swallow the premise if you're going to sit through this....and amazingly, we hit 'delete' on our common sense for 96 minutes and damn if we didn't enjoy the zippy carnival ride this movie takes you on. Our plucky little heroine (Emma Roberts) throws her innate caution to the wind and takes up the increasingly nutty 'Nerve' challenges (to the delirious excitement of the website's audience, watching and texting on every electronic device imaginable, except for microwave ovens and George Foreman grills)  Joining her in her all night, New York City escapades.... a fellow player/mystery guy played by Dave Franco.....yes, the brother who looks like he was cloned from a scraping of James Franco's index finger.

BQ's big question.....which remains unanswered by the film....who is running this borderline diabolical website. We waited in vain for a reveal, for the climax to lift up the curtain, maybe show a motor-mouthed Jesse Eisenberg-ish supervillain behind it all....but, alas, no. (What we really hoped for - the "Nerve" website masterminded by a pimply 13 year old boy camped out in his parents' basement....or better yet, Donald Trump's imaginary bedridden 400 pound hacker, lolling about with an I-Pad in one bulbous hand and economy-size Cheetos in the other... . Film-makers, feel free to use those ideas for any planned sequels....)  After restoring our common sense(we can't remember which combination of FN and F key we used) we'll still click on *** 3 stars for "Nerve"....a fast, fun little time waster.