I was quite surprised to see in the newspaper yesterday that there was a new movie premiered in the biggest cinema chain in Indonesia. I did not have any information, nor did I ever watched the trailer before. So I googled it and watched the trailer first, while also reading the premise. It seemed interesting enough so I asked whether my wife would be interested to see it. As she was going to watch an Indonesian musical movie which I was not really keen to see, she was ok to watch this movie too. Since the movie would start at 7 PM, I had enough time to be there without such a rush. I guess that would be around the best time to watch a movie on weekdays. Anyway, let's move on to the story.
Brief Story Line
Movie started with the scene of a computer screen opened by Vee (Emma Roberts - Nancy Drew, Scream 4 etc) where we could see what she was doing such as looking at JP, a high school jock that she had a crush on but afraid to tell and also rejecting offer to go into arts college. She got a video call from her best friend Sydney (Emily Meade - My Soul to Take, Money Monster etc). She introduced Vee to an online game called NERVE where people can be a "player" and be challenged to various dares and acquire money. Sydney was quite a famous player with many followers and invited Vee to be a "watcher" as she knew Vee would not be daring enough to be a player.
After disappointed with Sydney for challenging her to get to know JP, Vee was feeling upset and decided to enroll herself to the NERVE game and become a player. The game later easily connect to all Vee's social medias and acquiring her personal information including her friends contacts. Once she become a player, there were 3 rules that must be followed. Players must use their own phone to record, if players withdraw all the money won would be returned and players not allowed to report to the police.
So Vee called her other best friend Tommy (Miles Heizer - Parenthood TV series) to accompany her for her first challenge which was easy enough as she was supposed to kiss a random guy and would receive $100 if she completed the challenge. Tommy who seemed to be having a crush on Vee was not really supportive, but nevertheless he went along with Vee's intent. After finding a guy who was reading a novel which was Vee's favorite, she went ahead and kiss him quite long. Ian (Dave Franco - Now You See Me, Neighbors etc) apparently was a player as well.
The watchers seemed to like Vee & Ian's chemistry and when the next dare would involve the two of them going to town, Vee hesitantly accept the dare despite the protest from Tommy. But Vee could not be hold down after feeling the adrenaline rush for her first dare and she rode with Ian to the town and further adding to her reward money which were transferred to her joint account with her mother Nancy (Juliette Lewis - From Dusk Till Dawn, What's Eating Gilbert Grape etc). She was surprised to these money coming and asked Tommy's advice about possible hacking. Tommy apparently was a person who also have hacker background calmed her down. But he was suspicious of Ian as he was unable to look for Ian's information in the internet and he sought more info from his fellow hacker friend.
When Vee and Ian's dares were becoming more and more liked by the watchers, Sydney felt a bit jealous and started to find ways to increase her popularity by doing the very high dare. She was aiming to become one of the finalists who would get the top prizes. Meanwhile another very high profile player named JD (Machine Gun Kelly aka MGK) was also aiming to be the finalists. And he was ready to do whatever it takes to become the finalist and win the game.
So how would this game ends? Who would win and go on become the finalists to get all the prizes? What was Ian's background? Would Vee be able to continue and finish all the dares despite her difficulties in getting out of her comfort zone? Find them all in this interesting fresh movie.
End of Brief Story Line
To my surprise, I quite enjoyed this movie. There were few moments that were exciting and quite breath taking to see especially scenes involving death defying stunts. However, the pace were not very fast and did not create the rush that I was expecting for through the finale. Maybe I was having too high expectations after those crazy scenes in the middle of the movie.
The movie was filled with lots of music and have a feeling of teenager kind. There was not a lot of special effects and there were scenes where they were shot as though from the players' handphone to add the feel of what the players were experiencing. Emma Roberts seemed believable as the "good girl" type who in reality would not be able or have the courage to do the crazy stunts. While Dave Franco seemed a little bit too mature in this role. Perhaps because I noticed that Vee's friends looked young enough to be high school students (which is quite refreshing to see since most high school movies were showing students who looked old enough to be in college or even beyond).
Overall though, this movie has got a fresh idea of capturing online reality type of game. It is exciting to see at least some producers willing to take a risk to produce this kind of movie with quite recent & up to date world's reality of online gaming. It also reminded us to be careful on playing this type of game and especially not to reveal too much information on our social media apps.
So if you are interested to see such movie, then this movie would be to your liking. With so many censors done by Indonesian censorship body, this movie would be suitable for teenagers to see. Since it is currently only playing in 1 cinema chain, and there will be other movies released this week and next week, perhaps you should see it soon before it disappeared from the cinemas likely in 2 weeks time.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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