For the past 15 years, Hollywood has been chasing what crystalized so perfectly in The Social Network, and Hulu’s Swiped represents yet another misguided attempt to capture lightning in a bottle. There have been some wins here and there: films and mini-series like Blackberry or The Dropout that have successfully mythologized the almost Shakespearean struggles between the geniuses who created the companies or tech we’re all familiar with and those who sought to bring them down. But for every one that breaks through, there are a thousand more imitators that are instantly forgotten – and that’s not including the countless documentaries made on the same subjects. Though, if you went into a straight-to-Hulu release written by Rachel Lee Goldenberg (who also directs), Bill Parker, and Kim Caramele, expecting quality comparable to David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s film, somebody lied to you along the way.

Swiped tells the true story of Whitney Wolfe (Lily James, Relay) and her rapid rise and equally rapid descent in the tech world as she helps build dating app Tinder. Though the filmmakers make it abundantly clear, at the beginning and end of the film, that the events of the film are only inspired by real people and events, and the film was not made with the participation of Whitney. Audiences assume that adaptations of real stories embellish or jumble the timelines and motivations of characters to some extent, so this just reeks of the studio not trusting the viewers to understand even the most basic rules of how movies work. It would be just as easy to flash a “PLEASE DON’T SUE!” watermark across the screen throughout the film. 

To the writers’ credit, Wolfe isn’t solely responsible for the app’s core ideas like the swiping feature. Rather, she’s the marketing wizard who thinks up the name during a brainstorming session and travels to college sororities and fraternities to whip up new users. She begins the film trying to find investors for a start-up to fund her non-profit idea, hoping to find someone as passionate about making the world a better place as she is. But the only person who moderately entertains her is Sean (Ben Schnetzer), who sees her malleable enthusiasm as a way to help his own incubator, where she quickly gets folded into launching Tinder.

Whitney soon begins a (mostly off-screen) relationship with fellow Tinder executive and long-time friend of Sean’s Justin (Jackson White), but it sours, along with her standing at the company. Goldenberg takes every opportunity to show how rotten the men, and their system, have become, and how high the deck is stacked against her. Based on our current reality and the headlines we see every day, this doesn’t ring false, but surely there must have been a more subtle way of getting this point across. Sean presents as a close ally of Whitney’s, but makes every excuse for why Justin’s toxic behavior won’t be punished. Eventually Whitney leaves and creates Bumble, a female-driven dating app, with the backing of Russian financier/weirdo Andrey (Dan Stevens). 

The closest Swiped comes to an interesting internal conflict for Whitney is when news leaks of Andrey’s toxic behavior, which Whitney and her team have never experienced first-hand. Does Whitney choose to believe the accused and possibly lose her funding, or does she push back and stand against everything she believes? James’s performance works well enough to elevate this most basic material, but nobody should tune in specifically to see her. Even Stevens, who’s made a career out of playing unhinged characters, isn’t given enough room to be let loose.

Hollywood loves to chase trends, and it loves to learn the wrong lessons about why those trends began in the first place. With The Social Network, the film succeeded because it dove into the toxic, complicated personalities which were necessary to create a social media site which would ultimately become a force for evil. Of course, Hollywood believed that audiences were simply drawn into seeing how a ubiquitous, billion-dollar company came into being. And now we have Swiped.

Swiped will be available to stream on Hulu on September 19.

OSCAR POTENTIAL:

• None. Hulu will likely be submitting for the Emmy’s instead, and its chances for a nomination in the TV Movie category are similarly zero.