This article contains plot points from the film Swiped.Swiped is a movie stuck in the 2010s. It’s not just that the events portrayed in the movie happen between 2012 and 2014, when entrepreneur Whitney Wolfe Herd helps create Tinder, gets ousted from the company, and founds Bumble. Nor is it just the movie’s liberal use of Daft Punk and LCD Soundsystem needle drops, nor its outdated form of “Lean In” corporate feminism.No, Swiped is a movie stuck in the 2010s because it doesn’t know how to feel about online dating.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Directed by Rachel Lee Goldenberg, who shares a co-writer credit with Bill Parker and Kim Caramele, Swiped follows stars Lily James as Herd, as she joins up with Sean Rad (Ben Schnetzer) to make Tinder into a viable app and starts dating fellow exec and apparent nice guy Justin Mateen (Jackson White). When Justin becomes abusive and Sean keeps neglecting to give her credit, Whitney gets pushed out of the company and, with the help of other female Tinder evacuees, forms the female-focused Bumble.For a movie about dating apps, Swiped has surprisingly little to say about modern dating. Goldenberg makes liberal use of montages, but only two involve internet dating. In one, we spend a few seconds on two young men who match with one another, and later show up married—a short but clear endorsement of dating apps.The other montage, however, is a bit more ambiguous. In a series of shot-reverse-shots, all in wide-angle lens, we see Whitney go on dates with random men, pretending to flirt but in fact conducting market research. James gives a committed, layered performance as the go-getter Whitney, so we see how her dates could interpret the questions she launches at them as good-natured flirting. However, we also see that she’s really grilling them to figure out what men like and dislike in dating apps. Soon, she’ll use this information to transform Sean’s ill-conceived app Match Box into the wildly successful Tinder.Swiped doesn’t spend much time on the dating concept because it doesn’t care about anything other than Whitney herself. It’s a myopic hagiography about an executive, just as hollow and self-serving as other recent product biopics like Air, Tetris, and Unfrosted. Even Whitney’s unacknowledged racism towards a friend Tisha (Myha’la) gets treated with kid gloves, just another obstacle for her to overcome as she becomes a success.But when Swiped does glance at modern dating, it doesn’t like what it sees. In a scene designed to demonstrate her business acumen, Whitney convinces a group of college girls to use the app because the boys on her campus are using it. However, we see through crosscutting that the boys are only using it because Tisha’s signing them up for it at the same time.Inadvertently, the sign-up scene suggests that people sign up for dating apps under false pretenses. That message is echoed by the aforementioned market research scene, in which she pretends to be interested in the men who go out with her, but she’s actually using them for information. She does go home with one guy for a one-night stand, but the montage very much frames that moment of romantic connection as an anomaly within her business goals.Between Whitney’s dissembling and the host of obscene pictures that men send via Tinder, Swiped doesn’t make dating apps look too great. Whitney may describe her Tinder successor Bumble female focused and “intersectional” (without, crucially, defining that term for herself or the audience), but we never actually see it at work.Tellingly, Whitney’s two long-term relationships happen not via an app, but through more traditional means. She meets Justin at her job, as he is Sean’s best friend and also works at Tinder. Their first date couldn’t be more old-school, as Justin takes her to a family dinner, which Goldenberg shoots with hand-held shaky cam to accentuate the intimacy and chaos. Later in the film, Whitney meets her future husband Michael (Pierson Fodé) in equally familiar manner, when he offers to buy her a drink at a bar.Just because the two most significant relationships happen outside of dating apps doesn’t mean that Swiped valorizes the old ways over the new. Michael is blandly dreamy, a handsome guy who has no motivation beyond supporting Whitney, but Justin immediately becomes a monster, turning from a good guy who introduces her to his mother to a controlling gaslighter in the span of a few scenes.Swiped is convinced that Whitney is a brilliant executive and a good person. To that end, it implies that Tinder and especially Bumble are good apps for finding a partner. But in practice, Swiped has a far more dire outlook. Whether you’re using an app or hooking up at a bar, the romantic world is unpredictable, with maybe one dreamboat among the abusers and liars—even if one of those liars is the hero of the movie.Swiped is available to stream on Hulu now in the U.S. and Disney+ in the U.K.The post What Swiped Fails to Say About Modern Dating Culture appeared first on Den of Geek.