The Movie: The Social Reckoning
The Director: Aaron Sorkin
The Cast: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, with Bill Burr, and Jeremy Strong
The Story: Frances Haugen, a young Facebook engineer, enlists the help of Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter, to go on a dangerous journey that ends up blowing the whistle on the social network’s most guarded secrets.
The Rating: 5 / 10
The Review:
The longer I watched this movie, the less I liked it. The more I think about this movie, the less I like it. Director Aaron Sorkin was a co-writer along with Ben Mezrich for David Fincher's The Social Network and the difference between the two directors, at least within this context is glaringly obvious. The difference between the two movies is also night and day. Fincher's movie is like a surgical dissection of the early days of Facebook all told in a highly engaging manner. The Social Reckoning feels more like it wants to come off as being really smart and edgy while nearly crossing the line into parody, especially when it comes to how Mark Zuckerberg is portrayed on screen.
Jesse Eisenberg's take on the Facebook founder was so smart and so entertaining and is such a huge contrast to Jeremey Strong's version which felt so out of place and more like it belonged in a series of skits on Saturday Night Live. I'm still not sure if he was trying to portray the man honestly or just blatantly poking fun at his attitude, mannerisms, and ways of speaking. The story bounces back and forth between moments of Zuckerberg with his team and the teaming up of Frances Haugen with Jeff Horwitz who work to expose some of the nefarious inner workings of the social media platform.
Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White are quite good in their roles as Haugen and Horwitz respectively and they play off of each other really well, so it was so frustrating when the movie would cut to scenes with Zuckerberg that were so bad and such a huge tonal shift, it really made no sense as a cohesive story. Wunmi Mosaku, who was a standout as Annie in Ryan Coogler's Sinners, shines again in this movie even though she's only really given a chance for her character to be angry and frustrated any time she's on screen. What she does is still some of the best work in the whole movie. We never see her on screen together with Madison but, if we had, it would have easily been a highlight of the movie.
I don't think I have much else to say about this movie, so I'll just say thank you for reading my review. If you are going to head out to see a movie at your local theater, there are so many better options than this one and I have no issue with telling you to just wait for it to show up on a streaming platform.
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