Swiped Review
With Tinder and Bumble now having over 100 million users between them, it’s no real surprise that a film was made covering founder Whitney Wolfe Herd and her rise to the top. Swiped, the latest release by 20th Century Studios, follows her story as she breaks into the male-dominated tech industry by launching two innovative dating apps and eventually becoming the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.
Off the bat, it feels a little unsure what type of message it wants to portray to audiences. It floats between being an empowering film about the rise of Herd and the creation of the apps, whilst also being a quite difficult watch about just how awful some of the men within the industry are. Lily James (Herd) does a really good job throughout with her performance, but the script often feels a little thin, leading to most of the other characters never really feeling that deeper than surface level. As a result, some of the characters almost feel like caricatures of tech archetypes rather than real people. Positively, however, Dan Stevens adds a lot of humour as Russian tech mogul Andrey Andreev, Myha’la forms a charming duo with Herd as Tisha, and both Jackson White/Ben Schnetzer do well with the complex nature of tech bros Justin Mateen and Sean Rad.
Towards the second half, the story really begins to move Herd’s story along as we witness her leaving Tinder to a barrage of abuse, and it’s here we see the best of the film, with the writing/directing by Rachel Lee Goldenberg finding its feet on a much firmer ground. It does feel a little rushed compared to the first half, but teaming up with Andreev allows James to show a much more empowered Herd as she starts Bumble, a female-focused dating app, alongside Tisha and other female employees from her time at Tinder.
The film spans a broad period of time due to the prolonged rise-fall-rise nature of Herd’s story, which provides the production with ample scope to ground the film in a fun soundtrack from the period (Hello, The Ting Tings) as well as costumes that evoke the 2010s. It all adds up to help shape the story of Herd as we witness her from 2012 all the way through to becoming CEO of the parent company that ultimately owns Bumble, MagicLab, and Badoo.
In the end, Swiped tells an easy-to-watch, entertaining story about the rise of Whitney Wolfe Herd, a hugely successful entrepreneur, and it does so by covering some of her high moments and her lows. It doesn’t work quite as well as the dramatisation of the start of Facebook, The Social Network, but that shouldn’t take away anything from what does work for the film. It’s a story a lot of people don’t know, and through a fast retelling (it’s under 2 hours), you successfully get a glimpse into how Herd rose to the top at such a young age, thanks to a strong performance from Lily James, a punchy script and an interesting journey to follow!
★★★
Swiped is on Disney+ on September 19th.
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