"THE SOCIAL RECKONING" - MINI-REVIEW

Writer/director Aaron Sorkin’s THE SOCIAL RECKONING, arriving 16 years after David Fincher’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK, is not this year’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK (not even close), but it might be this year’s SPOTLIGHT (with the caveat that I did not like SPOTLIGHT, a movie in which an important story was told in the most A to B, dry-as-plain-toast way).

Sigh. There is a fully realized movie in here somewhere. THE SOCIAL RECKONING works on paper. It has all the right ingredients. It has an exciting cast: Mikey Madison (fresh off her Oscar win for ANORA) as whistleblower Frances Haugen; Jeremy Allen White as Wall Street Journal tech writer Jeff Horwitz; and Jeremy Strong as an increasingly inhuman Mark Zuckerberg. It has the Oscar winning writer of the original. Collaborators in the craft departments are solid. Unfortunately, the script is overcooked, the direction is undercooked (Sorkin needs to relinquish the directing duties already), and the actors (who don’t convey with their bodies the urgency of the dialogue) serve it up lukewarm. I can’t say that I was disappointed because the original Fincher film casts a long shadow. However, the whole thing feels insincere, the jokes oddly timed, and given the speed of the Internet and our news cycle, already dated.

If you think I’m being unfair, let’s say THE SOCIAL NETWORK didn’t exist and all we had was THE SOCIAL RECKONING. It’s still not a fully realized movie. In setting out to make an “important movie,” Sorkin forgot to make an entertaining one.

THE SOCIAL RECKONING is in theaters now.

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