‘The Social Reckoning’ Review: A Talented Cast in a Film That Falls Short

Synopsis: Follows Frances Haugen, a young Facebook engineer, who enlisted the help of Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter, to blow the whistle on the social network’s most guarded secrets.
Director: Aaron Sorkin
Stars: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Bill Burr, Jeremy Strong

I’m a big fan of Aaron Sorkin’s writing and can name many works I admire. While most people often cite The West Wing, A Few Good Men, and The Social Network, I’ve always been a big fan of  The Newsroom, Sports Night, and Molly’s Game.

Sorkin is a highly decorated Hollywood auteur with a very specific style: quick, witty dialogue, characters who seem to be thinking three steps ahead of everyone else and, of course, the famous “walk and talk” between his characters.

Nominated for four Academy Awards, Sorkin won one for The Social Network, and multiple Emmy Awards for The West Wing. It is widely recognized that The West Wing significantly declined in quality after Sorkin left the show at the end of its fourth season.

In short, I am incredibly impressed by Sorkin’s résumé and accolades throughout his career.

Going into The Social Reckoning, I was hoping he would recreate some of that magic he has shown throughout his career, but specifically the magic of The Social Network, the film that introduced audiences to Mark Zuckerberg and the origin story of Facebook while somehow making conversations about technology, business and lawsuits feel incredibly entertaining.

Sorkin’s Academy Award-winning screenplay gave the film memorable quotes and led to incredible editing and very strong performances. It would stand to reason that the follow-up would have some of those same characteristics, right?

Well, not so fast.

The Social Reckoning focuses on Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), who is awkward and doesn’t seem to fit in with her co-workers, constantly questioning what they are doing. She has recently joined Facebook’s Civic Integrity Team and disagrees with its priorities.

Meanwhile, Jeff Horowitz (Jeremy Allen White), a newly minted investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal is tasked with investigating Facebook.

He uses LinkedIn to reach out to members of the Civic Integrity Team and eventually contacts Frances. No one at Facebook will listen to her, so she is willing to sacrifice her non-disclosure agreement to speak with the journalist.

She quickly realizes that when it comes to technology jargon, he is out of his depth. After all, he can’t even work his vehicle’s navigation system.

There is an important story here.

There is evidence that Facebook and social media can contribute to radicalization, misinformation and political polarization. For many people, Facebook has also become their primary source of news.  Those are serious issues that deserve to be examined, especially when you consider just how much influence these platforms have over the information people consume every day.

The problem is that The Social Reckoning isn’t a particularly strong movie, which is frustrating because Aaron Sorkin should be one of the best people to tell this story.

What made The Social Network so special wasn’t simply that it was about Facebook. It was the way Sorkin took complicated material and turned it into something sharp, funny, intelligent and incredibly entertaining. His dialogue had a rhythm to it. His characters were constantly challenging one another. Even when people were sitting around talking about something incredibly technical, you felt like you were watching something important unfold.

That Sorkin magic is largely missing here.

The casting is fine. Madison is an Academy Award-winning Best Actress, while Allen White has racked up countless awards for his performance in The Bear; they just aren’t given great material here.

There are moments where you can see glimpses of the writer I love. But instead of the rapid-fire dialogue and memorable exchanges that made The Social Network so entertaining, much of this film feels like information being delivered to the audience.

And that makes the comparison to The Social Network unavoidable.

This is not simply a case of comparing a sequel to a great movie because the two films share a subject. The Social Reckoning is directly connected to the world established by The Social Network and seeks to continue the conversation about what Facebook became after its creation.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the same impact.

It reminded me of Joker: Folie à Deux. The original Joker was such a strong film that the follow-up had an incredibly difficult task. Folie à Deux was a bad movie, and it struggled to live up to what made the original so compelling.

I had a similar feeling watching The Social Reckoning.

The original first film was confident, well constructed and so entertaining that I kept waiting for this movie to deliver that same feeling. I kept waiting for the dialogue, the performances or the storytelling to really take off.

It never quite does.

That doesn’t mean the issues at the centre of The Social Reckoning aren’t important. They are. If anything, the story of how social media can influence what people believe, what news they consume and how they interact with the world has become even more relevant.

But relevance alone doesn’t make a great movie.

I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to be entertained. Most importantly, I wanted to feel as if I were watching an Aaron Sorkin movie.

Instead, I walked away wishing this film had some more of the qualities that made The Social Network such a memorable piece of filmmaking.

I still really like Aaron Sorkin as a writer. I just wish The Social Reckoning reminded me why.

Grade: D+