'Nerve' Emma Roberts & Dave Franco Starred - Propulsive Thriller

In “Nerve,” a dark-heart-of-the-Internet thriller made with a glib pop-up glow, Vee (Emma Roberts), a high school senior in Staten Island who’s the straightest girl in her clique (though she’s cool enough to know her Wu-Tang by heart), gets sucked up into a sinister competition that emerges out of the deep web. It’s a game called Nerve that operates through a smartphone app — though it could just as well have been devised by a savvy TV producer who loved “Fear Factor” and “The Hunger Games” and ordered up a show that was a cross between them.

In the movie, anyone who makes the perilous click to play Nerve chooses to be in one of two groups: players or watchers. The players are the bold ones who act out a series of dares, which start off as innocuous (jumping onto a motorcycle with a leader-of-the-pack stranger) and then head toward the shiveringly dangerous (don’t-look-down heights are a favorite motif). The players receive money for each dare, but more than that, they rack up followers. They get to know that they’re loved. The watchers, by contrast, are the passive drone/fans sitting on the sidelines. But they’re also the ones controlling the whole thing. They think up the dares and become a live audience for them on their phones and computers, choosing to follow this or that player. Are we not entertained?