With the streets full of people running into traffic while staring at their phones and chasing Pokémon, the zeitgeist timing couldn’t be better for “Nerve,” a thriller about people performing embarrassing and increasingly death-defying stunts in the name of a shadowy online game. But while the film’s vertiginous set pieces are appropriately heart-clenching, it’s not nearly as successful at little details like plot and character.
If “Nerve” were an app, you’d be hooked on it for a few days before deleting it when you realized that its limitations outweigh its ambitions.
Emma Roberts stars as Venus “Vee” Delmonico — no, seriously — a Staten Island high school senior who’s too afraid to tell her mom (an underutilized Juliette Lewis) that she wants to go cross country to CalArts to attend college.