movie review
THE SOCIAL RECKONING
Runtime: 112 minutes. Rated R (language, including frequent sexual expletives and profanity). In theaters.
Imagine a movie in which a dark corporate conspiracy is uncovered: McDonald’s is making its customers fat — and the suits all know it.
Duh, right?
Well, that’s not far off from the takeaway of writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s disappointing and unnecessary follow-up to “The Social Network,” “The Social Reckoning,” about the damage Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and Meta went on to inflict on the world. Social media is bad and brings out the worst in everybody. Yeah, yeah. Big whoop.
To call “Reckoning” a sequel feels wrong. “The Social Network,” one of the best studio films of this century, is infinitely superior and tonally unrecognizable from this high-on-its-own-supply dud in every way. Director David Fincher’s triumph took a relatively recent event (Facebook was founded in 2004; the movie hit theaters in 2011) and turned it into a sexy, unlikely and timeless underdog story.
Our hero was an unapologetic jerk with undeniable genius powered by a chip on his shoulder, yet we rooted for him hard anyway. Sorkin’s script exploded with dazzling wit and heart-pumping drama. And Jesse Eisenberg, casting perfection, became a star.
Next to it, foghorn “Reckoning” is forgettable, plodding, obvious and unaccomplished.
If “Network” was ballet shoes, this “All The Zuckerberg’s Men” is soggy rain boots.
It should never have been made.
Sorkin, one of the only name-brand screenwriters alive, does not prove that he still deserves that vaunted status. This is an awful screenplay: A jargon-obsessed, limp, rudimentary bullet-pointed rundown of unexciting events marred further by lame jokes, ugly cinematography and Sorkin’s most self-indulgent tendencies.
The central Wall Street Journal reporter, Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), for example, needlessly natters on about the musical “Showboat” and the novel “A Tale of Two Cities,” much like President Jed Bartlet would ramble about his bookshelf on “The West Wing.”
“I’m not a Frank Capra character!,” Mikey Madison’s Frances Haugen unbelievably yells.
Sorkin writes with bloviating self-importance, as if “West Wing” composer W.G. Snuffy Walden is pumping swelling orchestral music into his ear as he types.
And so this movie really amounts to three characters in service of an author. When nobody is around to rein Sorkin in, his dialogue is hampered by a braggy quality that loves nothing more than to call attention to itself.
Much like honey-baked-ham Jeremy Strong does playing Zuckerberg. The “Succession” star, who prefers to get lost in his roles (“Call me Mark,” that kind of thing), makes Darth Vader look like Dupree with his stiff-as-a-board, automoton villainy. He clearly has no emotional grasp on his enigmatic character, so he, well, showboats. The actor, doing some of his worst work of his career, comes off absolutely ridiculous as he willfully ignores the warning signs.
Madison fares better as Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who helps Horwitz reveal that the website has been enabling dangerous extremity and divisiveness for profit. Madison is best known for playing the take-no-prisoners, loud, lovable Anora in that homonymous best picture winner. She shows another side here. Nerdy Frances, a member of Facebook’s Civic Integrity Team, is different — quiet, all-business, socially inept. She’s Eisenberg-era Zuckerberg, but with a conscience.
Frances teams up with Horwitz, who White plays rather blandly as he stares off into the great beyond, to expose the truth.
But even the gifted Madison can’t lift most of the dreadful material Sorkin has thrown at her while abruptly yelling, “catch!”. When Horwitz reminds Frances — a woman Sorkin can’t decide is smart or not — that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were “metro” reporters, she replies, “They used mousse?”. Come on, man.
The boring story hops confusingly between 2019, 2020 and 2021, obnoxiously roping in the Covid pandemic and January 6th riot along the way — Sorkin’s point being that Facebook caused or exacerbated them. Fair enough. But he argues it with a snarling, MSNBC rage, the likes of which makes most people leave the room. Hypocritically, he wants you to yell at the screen just as much as the Facebook algorithm does.
The movie begins with a drunk woman being pulled over by the cops, going on a racist rant and posting a video of it to Facebook. That shocking event inspires Frances, who believes in the mission of her company, to contact Jeff and right a perceived wrong. And from there, the film flatly stomps along until stridently ending on the 2021 violence in Washington DC.
File “The Social Reckoning” away with other needless sequels we pretend never existed: “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “The Matrix Resurrections” and “Jaws 2.”
I feel so angry and radicalized by the movie, I’m gonna go post about it on Facebook!
