Delayed Reaction: Nerve

The Pitch: Tron meets Punked.

I'm going to save you the suspense: this is a lousy movie. I fully rejected all of it from the first frame. I just didn't buy any part of it, even after I tried to turn off my brain. Here's a list of my grievances as I watched this:

• There's no way there's that much money in doing these challenges.
• Even accepting how much money is in it, the amount that some stunts earn versus others don't seem at all consistent.
• For good money, why aren't way more kids playing?
• Emma Roberts' challenges were way too easy for her to climb up the ranking so much.
• There is no way that this game hasn't gone public. The idea that adults don't know about something this large, lucrative, and intricate is Rugrats-level silly.
• The comments from the internet that they show about any of the players is way too nice and PG-13.
• Also, the challenges are way too PG-13. If I know the internet, the challenges would get perverted very quickly.
• They don't even try to make Emma Roberts looks like a passable social reject. At least She's All That-it with glasses or something.
• The presentation of the "dark web" in this is just adorable.
• If the Watchers are so jazzed about the idea of seeing someone kill someone else, how did it take until the finals for a challenge to suggest physically harming another person? "Pick a fight with ____" has to be one of the more common challenges.

I'm going to stop there, but virtually every scene had something that made no sense to me. Look, I know why I saw this movie. It had a lot of young actors I like and a reasonably interesting premise. It's the same reason I saw movies like Unfriended or Project Almanac. But even those movies had an internal logic that made some sense. This is a lot of nonsense thrown together and little more. I always mention my One Big Leap that I give films. This film needed at least a dozen big leaps of logic.

I do realize that I'm not the target audience for this. That doesn't really excuse it though. That's a lazy defense. There's a lot of movies that aren't targeted to me that I didn't like and I still recognize that they are well made. This film is almost the opposite. It's a very poorly done movie but I had no trouble watching it. It's more forgettable than anything.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend