'Nerve' is sloppy and improbable

“Nerve” imagines the dangers of an online game gone viral, then gone mad.

It comes off like a combination of “The Hunger Games,” “Saw” and Pokemon Go.

Maybe that sounds like a good thing. It’s not.

Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman attempt to tap into the worst fears and most dangerous aspects of online mania. They get some things right, and you can’t argue against the pure adrenaline. But as a social document, it is not the dire warning it wants to be, in part because the storytelling is so sloppy.

Also, sometimes it’s just sort of stupid.

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Emma Roberts stars as Vee, a high-school senior longing to head off to art school in California, but becoming resigned to accepting a scholarship to a local college in New Jersey and living with her mom (Juliette Lewis). She’s the smart good girl with the wild best friend, Sydney (Emily Meade). Sydney has gotten into an underground online game called Nerve, which bills itself as truth or dare without the truth.

You sign in as either a player or a watcher. Watchers pay to observe. Players carry out dares dreamed up by the watchers, and pocket the cash value associated with each dare. They start small and get increasingly daring (moon the crowd while cheering at a game) and even dangerous. The bigger the dare, the bigger the payoff. It’s all illegal, of course. Thus the warning issued during the sign-up process: ‘’Snitches get stitches.’’

Vee doesn’t have much interest in playing, despite encouragement from Sydney and her other friends. The notable holdout: Tommy (Miles Heizer), resident genius computer guy, who doesn’t trust the game.

But an embarrassing incident leads Vee to join up — as a player, to everyone’s surprise. Her first dare is to kiss a stranger in a restaurant. She selects a guy reading “To the Lighthouse,” Vee’s favorite book. Well, isn’t that a coincidence? His name is Ian (Dave Franco), and he turns out to be a player, too. Watchers like them together, and send them on increasingly risky dares.

So Vee goes from someone who won’t take chances to someone who will risk her life at the whim of an army of anonymous online creeps with a guy she just met. All this in the course of an hour or so.

The game, too, explodes. The very night Vee joins happens to be the final. Somehow, you can go from having a few thousand followers to all of a sudden being the No. 1 player on the site with your moves orchestrated by seemingly millions. Neither the game nor the dares holds up to much examination.

But logic isn’t what the directors are after. The film, written by Jessica Sharzer and based on a novel by Jeanne Ryan, emphasizes adrenaline over intelligence. And on that front, it doesn’t disappoint. Using cellphone video (players have to record their dares on their own cameras) and the kind of headlong videos you see in a GoPro demonstration, Joost and Schulman, who directed ‘’Catfish’’ and a couple of the ‘’Paranormal Activity’’ movies, crank up the tension. It’s effective in that regard, but not so much that it patches over the plot holes.

Roberts and Franco are fine. The insanely viral nature of the game would have seemed like overkill just a year or two ago, but anyone who has seen Pokemon Go players wandering the earth, phone in hand, will recognize this is no longer an exaggeration.

You certainly won’t be bored. And if you go into “Nerve” looking for a thrill ride, you won’t be disappointed. If you’re hoping for more, that’s a different story.

Bill Goodykoontz of The Arizona Republic is a film critic for the USA TODAY NETWORK. Read his blog at goodyblog.azcentral.com. For movie stories, trailers and more go to movies.azcentral.com. Twitter: goodyk.