If you're anything like me, you've been waiting for Dave Franco to become the leading man you always knew he could be. After a handful of scene-stealing, supporting roles in Now You See Me, 21 Jump Street, and Neighbors, Franco's finally getting ready to play the leading man in Nerve , a thriller about teenagers who end up caught in an online game of Dare that quickly spirals out of control. In the movie, Franco plays Ian, a stranger who ends up teaming up with a girl, Vee (Emma Roberts), to play Nerve, an online interactive game where users can dare players to do certain tasks. What begins as a fun game with two attractive people quickly becomes a sort of cat and mouse game with identity theft and life and death consequences. The movie doesn't come out in theaters until July 27, but we've got a Nerve exclusive clip and poster to satisfy you until then.
Nerve explores the social dynamics of online life and how our online life can sometimes feel more validating than our real one. For directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the filmmakers behind the infamous documentary Catfish , the whole concept of danger on the Internet was familiar territory. Whether they like it or not, Joost and Schulman seem to have made a nice niche for themselves — one that Joost called "internet storytelling" in an interview with in an interview with MTV. "The internet is not good nor bad; it just depends on how you use it," Joost said in that same interview. "I think there's a way of looking at Nerve as a really empowering game, and it's also the most awful thing that you can possibly imagine." I'll let you check out the clip below, in which Vee and Ian cary out a particularly dangerous dare involving a motorcycle and a blindfold, and decide how empowering you think Nerve is.
As Joost and Schulman revealed to MTV, they pushed the boundaries a bit when it came to speed limits and police escorts while shooting the sequence in New York City. The reason part of the stunt ended up taking place in a tunnel, for example, was to avoid the law-required police escort. You'll have to see the rest of the film to see what other insane stunts the movie features. Trust me, there are many.
Whether or not you'll dare to see Nerve, I just hope that Nerve doesn't actually become a real game to terrorize us all.
The film hits theaters July 27.
Images: Lionsgate (2)
