Swiped is a movie out of time. It’s a celebration of the girlboss era, nearly a decade too late, and a knockoff of The Social Network, 15 years after the fact, only without the excitement or the resonance. On top of that, it’s sort of a bizarre telling of the story, one that leaves out a couple of major aspects.
Swiped, directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg and landing on Hulu this week, is a pseudo-biopic of Whitney Wolfe, a major figure in the development of mobile dating apps. Wolfe (played by Lily James) was a co-founder of Tinder and then, after a contentious departure, went on to found Bumble.
The template of Swiped—a tech startup founder's fight with colleagues—was also the premise of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s 2010 film, The Social Network. But it’s lacking most of what made that movie great, whether it’s first-rate filmmaking, compelling conflicts, capturing a unique moment in time, or its early willingness to see that the young Mark Zuckerberg was a prick.
Swiped is missing all of that. It can’t find an entryway into the story, nor does it know what to do with Wolfe, besides canonizing her. The film doesn’t have much to say about online dating or that specific era of mobile apps; the limited series adaptation of Mike Isaac’s book Super Pumped, about the early days of Uber, nailed that milieu in a way that Swiped barely attempts. That show certainly critiqued that world’s toxic bro culture, but Swiped shows us little else.
And while a big part of The Social Network was that Sorkin crafted a great screenplay adaptation out of Ben Mezrich’s wretched book, Swiped isn’t based on any listed source material at all. Even more strangely, we’re notified at the end that Wolfe didn’t participate in the film, as her NDA with Tinder remains in effect.
We’re introduced to Wolfe as a fresh-out-of-college do-gooder who falls nearly by accident into an app incubator, from which Tinder emerges as the breakout product, one that introduced the concept of swiping right and left. (Lily James, who’s 36 and has been playing adults in movies for over a decade, isn’t the slightest bit believable as someone who was in college ago.)
Tinder had the corporate culture one would expect, with lecherous male executives openly tolerating sexual harassment in the office and on the app. So Wolfe ends up starting Bumble—where only women can send the first message—but is eventually disappointed by her male business partner there as well. The third act introduces a stark moral dilemma at the 11th hour, and then solves it extremely easily with a deus ex machina.
There’s a significant chunk of the story missing from the film: Grindr, the gay hookup app, was around a few years before Tinder, and it was long assumed that a heterosexual version wouldn’t work, because straight women wouldn’t go for it (The New Yorker wrote about this phenomenon in 2011). Tinder was significant because it was the first app that cracked that code. That’s an interesting story—how did they do it? What made it work? But the film leaves it out, and doesn’t even mention Grindr or that pre-Tinder dynamic.
There’s said to be a Sorkin-directed sequel on the way to The Social Network, covering the years afterward and how Mark Zuckerberg’s villain arc went from subtle to not-so-subtle. I’ve no idea whether it will be any good, although I could easily imagine an adaptation of Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Facebook memoir Careless People resulting in a better version of Swiped.