The Social Reckoning review: Aaron Sorkin's drama puts Facebook on trial, but it won't change anyone's minds ★★☆☆☆

This sequel to The Social Network dramatises how a Facebook whistleblower exposed the company's secrets. But with a "dead-eyed" Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, it lacks thrills.

It may be a film about a bunch of nerds setting up a website, but The Social Network (2010) won three Oscars and was nominated for five more. Directed by David Fincher, scripted by Aaron Sorkin, and starring Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, it somehow made Facebook's teething problems as dazzlingly entertaining as any stunt-packed spy caper. Sixteen years on, we have The Social Reckoning, a sort-of sequel which had the potential to be even more exciting.

Once again, its focus is Facebook, but this time Sorkin is the director as well as the screenwriter, and Jeremy Strong from Succession has taken over the role of Zuckerberg. While Eisenberg played him as a petulant princeling, Strong's version, like so many of his characters, is a dead-eyed, unsmiling boss from hell. 

There are other changes, too. The Social Network dramatised the legal squabbles between the Harvard students behind Facebook, whereas The Social Reckoning has a whistleblower and a journalist exposing the damage done to the world by social media. In a way, then, it tells a much bigger story than its predecessor. But in every way that counts, it's a much smaller film. Ironically, Sorkin's main theme is the alarming power that social media platforms have to influence us, but The Social Reckoning itself is unlikely to influence anyone.

Jeremy Allen White stars as Jeff Horwitz, an investigative reporter who transfers to the Wall Street Journal's San Francisco office in 2019. He wants to find out what's going at Facebook, but none of its staff will talk to him until he contacts Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, the Oscar-winning star of Anora. At a secret meeting, Haugen tells him that users are being pushed towards extremist groups – and that's just one of the issues she has uncovered while working in the company's Civic Integrity team.

So far, so promising: Sorkin is aiming at a crusading newspaper drama in the tradition of All the President's Men and Spotlight, and at times he almost hits the target. The opening sequence is a queasily credible portrait of someone who has been radicalised online, and the facts and figures about Facebook's impact on mental health are sobering: Horwitz learns that, according to internal research kept secret by the Facebook-owned Instagram, 32% of teenage girls with body-related anxieties felt worse after using it.

But The Social Reckoning doesn't have the tension or the urgency that such films need – or indeed the dynamism that Fincher might have brought to the project. No one ever threatens Horwitz or Haugen. They keep saying that they could be in danger, but they never actually are.

Unlike in The Social Network, Zuckerberg is a minor character with no inner life. Madison has a fraction of the ferocious energy she had in Anora. (Haugen, incidentally, is blue-eyed and blonde-haired, and was in her late-30s when the story took place, so Madison couldn't look less her if she tried.) And while Horvitz won a Pulitzer Prize for his articles, in the film his sleuthing amounts to talking to Haugen and setting up a fake Facebook account. Even more disappointingly, he is never seen in the headband he wore for one memorable TV news appearance.

Sorkin tries to add some momentum to his uneventful narrative by flipping back and forth between two timelines. In one of these, Horwitz and Haugen have their chats, all of which consist of her handing him some information, claiming that she loves her job, and insisting that she won't help him again (spoiler alert: she will). In the other strand, Zuckerberg rehearses for a senate hearing. Sorkin raises a few smiles with his trademark perky, quirky banter, as Zuckerberg's advisers instruct him on how to appear less robotic when giving his testimony, and Haugen chides Horwitz about his lack of tech knowledge (his one and only character trait). But neither of these repetitive strands has any real conflict. And, inconveniently for Sorkin, they never intertwine: Zuckerberg doesn't have any interaction with Horwitz or Haugen.

One of the film's fundamental problems is that Facebook is still going strong, and Zuckerberg is still worth more than $200 billion, so the viewer knows all along that there isn't an All The President's Men-style giant-killing finale in store. Despite its fire-and-brimstone title, in other words, The Social Reckoning doesn't have much of a reckoning.

But the main problem is that the drab drama just isn't intense enough to change anyone's mind. It's part of a current wave of films about super-rich industrialists that includes Alejandro G Iñárritu gonzo Tom Cruise vehicle, Digger, Alex Gibney's provocative Elon Musk documentary, Musk, and Luca Guadagnino's stylish biopic of Sam Altman, Artificial. But Sorkin's effort is the mildest and least ambitious of the bunch. You would probably keep watching if you caught it on television, but you might well scroll through your social media feed at the same time.

★★☆☆☆ 

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