In short: Nerve (2016)

High school senior Vee (Emma Roberts) is the sensible – and decidedly too pliable - one in her small group of friends, hiding behind her extroverted friend Sydney (Emily Meade), ignoring the mute pining of her friend Tommy (Miles Heizer), and pining for some quarterback guy herself. She’d never actually say something, of course.

However, things change when her peers pressure Vee into playing a new, mysterious online game named Nerve. Nerve pays its players for filming themselves fulfilling increasingly difficult dares, while another part of its customer base pays to watch and vote and judge. Riding on an adrenaline high, driven on by all filmmakers’ love for the classic cliché of the inhibited person losing all measure of control once she steps out of her rut, and by the fact that the game throws her together with mysterious, brooding hottie Ian (Dave Franco), Vee keeps playing and playing, going from silly to problematic to outright dangerous and cruel dares, only realizing what she’s doing when it is perhaps already too late.

There have been quite a few films attempting to use and/or exploit contemporary social media youth culture (man, do I feel old writing this) for horror and thriller plots, but quite a few of these films fail because it is all too obvious – even to a guy like me born in the late 70s of the last century – that the filmmakers have little clue about how actual teens live their online lives (“Something about the Bookface, right, Jim?”), and therefore can’t but fail trying to comment on it. Going by their filmography, Nerve’s directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and their screenwriter Jessica Sharzer are much closer to contemporary teen culture, and are consequently much better suited to evoke it as the basis for their film and comprehending what might be good or problematic about it.

This doesn’t mean that the film has any ambitions at being documentary or being “realistic”; it is more interested in grounding its thriller plot in something close to actual teen experience and then to exaggerate certain elements of it to comment on them. This grounding of course helps the film work as a thriller, too, building a reality whose boundaries can then be tested. Having said that, Nerve’s final act leaves any of that grounding business behind, solving the characters’ problems in ways that are certainly thematically appropriate but have nothing whatsoever to do with how computers are used, programming works, or what “open source” means. However, at this point, the film’s generally clever approach has earned it enough brownie points I feel it has also earned itself the right to leave the realm of plausibility behind.


Particularly since the film happens to be a solid teen thriller, with good acting, excellently paced escalation that usually also resonates thematically, beautiful, pretty damn eye-popping use of 2010s style neon colours and a slick but not vapid direction style. Now, Nerve’s finale is rather too on the nose for my taste (and would have utterly infuriated me by being so on the nose when I was a teenager) but I really think it is an honest and logical part of the film as a whole.

In short: The Way of the Gun (2000)

Two intellectually stunted small time criminals (Benicio del Toro and Ryan Phillippe) accidentally overhear a telephone call that suggests to them – not beholden to The Way of the Brain(s) – a brilliant plan: kidnap the surrogate mother (Juliette Lewis) of some rich guy’s (whose name they don’t even know nor attempt to find out) baby during the latest stage of her pregnancy and blackmail said rich guy into paying them a fortune. Turns out things go wrong in any which way they can, for the mysterious rich guy (Scott Wilson) is indeed highly involved in organized crime, so our idiot protagonists soon have problems with the surrogate mother’s surviving bodyguards (Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt) and rich guy’s chief bagman Joe “The director named me after the master of psychological softcore movies for no discernible reason” Sarno (James Caan).

And to drag a simple plot out into a two hour movie, every single damn character involved (plus a few I haven’t even mentioned) has his or her own private agenda, too, leading to the usual twists and turns.

Which to me is the core problem of Christopher McQuarrie’s The Way of the Gun: the way the film is set up, every single character on screen needs to function as a plot device, too, so most of them don’t act like people grasping for the things they want but rather like walking talking clichés who do what they do to complicate the plot. In theory, most of the characters do have motivations for what they do, but for some reason (might be the titular way of the gun, or a self-destructive attempt at making every twist a surprise, even though there’s little surprising for anyone vaguely savvy concerning films about guys with guns), McQuarrie decides to present most of them as ciphers and clichés, never actually letting them express any of the emotions or thoughts that are supposedly driving them. This leads to a film full of characters about whose bloody deaths one can’t bring oneself to care even the tiniest bit, not because they are very bad people (which they surely are), but because nobody would ever confuse these two-dimensional beings with people at all.

Adding insult to injury, the film actually features a cast of fine actors (well, and Ryan Phillippe, but what can you do?). Alas, it is a cast of fine actors who aren’t allowed to do more than just go through the motions in service of the over-plotted abomination of a script they’re trapped in.

Visually, McQuarrie’s film is rather on the beautiful side, slick and bloody and pretty and technically accomplished – and just as empty and meaningless as its script. There’s just nothing there not in a nihilistic sense, mind you, but following the Way of the Undernourished Script.

In short: Blueberry (2004)

aka Renegade

Mike Blueberry (Vincent Cassel) and his buddy Jimmy McClure (Colm Meaney) are marshals in an Old West town bordering on the holy mountains of the Chiricahua. Despite carrying some personal demons around with him, Blueberry is friends with the Chiricahua shaman Runi (Temuera Morrison), and is doing his best to keep the peace between everyone in the area.

That job is rather more difficult because some of the local whites believe the holy mountains to be home to a treasure hoard, and men like local rich guy Greg Sullivan (Geoffrey Lewis) – who just happens to be the father of Blueberry’s spunky and intense love interest Maria (Juliette Lewis) - or the crazy German prospector Prosit (Eddie Izzard) – whose name by the way translates into “cheers!” - are willing to do some quite shitty things to get at that gold.

However, there’s an even greater threat to the Chiricahuas, the peace, and perhaps even Blueberry’s soul around, in form of Blueberry’s oldest enemy, one Wallace Sebastian Blount (Michael Madsen), who is looking for something in the holy mountains, too. Blount isn’t looking for gold, though, but wants to learn a way to kill with his spirit. Which makes him the sort of enemy who can only be conquered in a giant peyote trip/healing spirit journey.

As you can see, Jan Kounen’s (loose, the titles tell us, and given my lack of knowledge with the source material, I’m just going to believe that) adaptation of venerable French leftist Western comic series Blueberry isn’t exactly a straightforward Western. Rather, it’s the kind of film that doesn’t end in a climactic shootout but in a climactic, CGI heavy drug trip.

Unlike myself Blueberry takes the whole shamanism thing very seriously, attempting to turn what could be a relatively straightforward tale of revenge and redemption into one of spiritual enlightenment, seeming to mean every strange thing it does quite intensely, which really left me as a watcher who doesn’t share its convictions in the position of either pointing and laughing at the crazy people (and I’m not that kind of atheist), or just rolling with it and trying to get into the spirit (sorry) of things.

The latter approach is made rather more easy by the simple fact that Kounen is really, really good at making the whole film feel like a drug trip full of symbols you might or might not understand, or where understanding them might not even be the point, with every camera angle seemingly chosen for maximum confusion; and that’s before the really rather effective (or silly, or both, depending on your position) religious tripping even starts.

Consequently, the film’s plot – such as it is – meanders through various Western clichés seen from a sideways angle, stops, starts, and stops again, making circles and turns that don’t really lead anywhere only to get back to the beginning of things. For a viewer who likes her films plot heavy, Kounen’s approach will probably be infuriating, but if you’re willing to let things just flow over you, you might get a lot out of the film.

At the very least, Blueberry is pretty much a one of a kind film (I don’t think comparing it with Jodorowsky would be fair, despite the shared interest in shamanistic practices and utter weirdness); if it’s successful for any given viewer will depend on him as much as on the film, I think.

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