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........

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