Swiped and the Curious Case of Who Was This Made For?

Everyone is an asshole, the movie

I make no apologies for my love of YA and RomComs. It's why I had a whole blog dedicated to teen shows and movies (and yes, I'm working on finishing up a Glee recap and starting up the Dawson's Creek ones again). There is just a nice familiarity that comes with them where a really good one can lift you up and a really bad one can, at least usually, make you laugh at its incompetence. They're fun.


Usually.


When I saw Swiped on (you guessed it) Netflix, I thought to myself 'self, why not give it a go?' It starred that guy from To All the Boys I've Loved Before and that was adorable so this will be a nice bit of fluff to warm you after a long and shitty day.


It started off perfectly normal. A guy being dropped off for his first day of college, he's nerdy and doesn't fit in. Your typical underdog story. We then get introduced to our resident love interest by having her introduce herself to a guy on campus who gets unnecessarily mad at her asking for his name. Like, ridiculously over the top upset about it and he tells her off for being needy. I figured that he was a one off douche guy that we were supposed to hate but I was really put off by the exchange and not in a fun, I hope this guy gets his comeuppance way but in a that was unnecessarily mean spirited way. He's clearly the bad guy, right? It's a one off thing, right?

It was not

James (our underdog) has a roommate, Lance (Peter from TAtBILB) who is a complete and utter shitbag, for lack of a better term. He acts dickish to James and ditches him to hang out with his other shitbag friends. What do a bunch of shitbags talk about, you ask? Well, they talk about how they wish there was an app that was able to eject a woman from his bed like the second he was done with her. Charming. Again, the name thing is brought up and these guys decide they want to build the ultimate dating, sorry, hook-up app. In this app, you are apparently not allowed to ask for anyone's name and you are not allowed to date anyone you meet on the app. HUGE red flags here.


Not only are these characters abhorrent in the lengths they will go to for emotionless sex, I think we're expected to find them just clueless and silly. On top of this, I don't think an app like this would take off with women at all. You're telling me that in this day and age, a woman would agree to meet up and have sex with a guy without even learning his name? For real? I haven't been in the dating scene for years but even I know that most girls who go on a date with a guy they just met, tell their friends who they are seeing and where they are going as a back up plan. Who would agree to this? The entire premise of the movie has already imploded in on itself.


But these guys plow on and enlist James' help because he's a big computer whiz. He builds the app on the condition that his name is not tied to it at all because he recognizes it's gross but not enough to not make it for these guys (and also for money to go to MIT). Somehow, Lance gets away with saying he made the app in his Computer Science class and says that he refuses to show the work which...yeah don't think that would fly. I also don't think an app like Jungle would take off and become the next big thing but according to this movie's logic, it does.


Now, here's where I start to question who this movie was made for. The guys are all horrible people or complacent but I still don't think this movie would appeal to guys because the movie seems to really hate men, like all of them. But the guys that are like the men depicted in this movie won't like it much because it's not really geared towards them as this is not a sex comedy that shows them lots of boobs. Would girls like this? Maaaybe? But probably not because none of the women are particularly well developed and they're mostly depicted as vapid morons that go along with whatever guys want because they are desperate for male validation, even if they have to put out to get it. Which is insanely insulting and also outdated.


My mind was boggling, who is the target of this movie that seems to hate everyone which showcases all men as callous, sex-obsessed, morons and all women as desperate bimbos that go along with being treated like crap to "get guys". Except for the virginal #notlikeothergirls love interest who is of course, so not into dating apps which makes her the ultimate prize for James to win. However, both of them are extremely wooden and kind of unappealing in their own rights so there's not really a love story to draw in the romantic crowd either. Is it a story about unlikely roommates learning and growing from each other? Nope, it's not that either. So what is this? WHO WAS THIS MADE FOR?

Who do you work for, movie??

And then, oh and then it all became clear. What started out as the set up for your typical sex romp college comedy, is actually a Boomer story about the evils of technology. It all became so clear the second James' grandfather tries to make a speech at Christmas but everyone is "too busy on their phones" and he has to confiscate them. I see you, old timer, I see your outdated ass. The movie shifts after this point to not care so much about characters or character arcs so much as pushing a Very Important Message: technology is bad, the old ways are better.


Does James care that his app is hurting women? Kind of, but not really. If he cared about that, he would have had a talk with Lance about it that first awkward moment they overhear girls crying about how much they hate the app and how it makes them feel but they have to put up with it anyway because all the guys are on it. It didn't matter to him because the girl he likes is #notlikeothergirls and doesn't use the app so no harm to him, it's just those other sluts using it, right? Do you want to know what makes him want to take down the app? His divorced mother starts using it which pisses off his womanizing father (who also uses the app but that's ok because he got a hot young girl out of it). He didn't want his mother using it and so he shut it down.


This pisses Lance and his friends off so he seeks refuge in a sorority where he promises to help them develop their own app to rival Jungle. He asks them what they want out of it but he's still not comfortable so he creates a survey and gives it to his grandparents to fill out because knowing their sex lives would help him create an app for modern young adults.

This won't fail at all

What does he learn? Actually talking to people and learning their names is totally needed in order to date and make connections. You don't fucking say? You know those young'uns, refusing to give out their names at any cost and being unknown is of the utmost importance. This movie totally gets it, you guys. Kids these days just need to stop using dating apps and date the old fashioned way. Problems solved.


One problem: this isn't the old days and no one acts the way they do in this movie. Things are not black and white and sex is not something that only men demand and women have to put up with. I don't know where the writer of this script got the idea that guys hate giving out their names to people or that women just go along with whatever guys want and are imprisoned by dating apps but the world is not as dire and bleak as this movie seems to think it is. I mean, yeah, climate change is going to destroy us all but human interactions have not changed that much. It's just that where we are having them is changing. For some people, the only way they can easily meet people is online and that shouldn't be shamed or seen as a bad thing.


This movie is a poorly made, poorly acted, mean-spirited mess. No one comes out looking good in this, save for the grandparents who are virtuous for having been born and met each other when today's technology didn't exist and that's a pretty shitty message to send. We cannot go back, we have to move forward and learn to live in and be kind to each other in the time we actually live in. This felt like a first draft attempt at a movie that honestly needed to dig a lot deeper and flesh out its characters way better for this to work. Technology does not make us bad people, lack of technology does not make us good. Technology just is and the good or bad is all in how we use it.


Lance in this movie, is using technology in a horrible way but really, it wasn't the app that did it, it was him and his rules that he put into it. The movie should have understood that Lance was the one that needed to change, not the use of tech. However, the movie posits that once the app is gone, Lance is suddenly good and wants to get to know a girl he suddenly likes. That's a garbage take and this is a garbage movie.


Please just skip this one. It's really not worth anyone's time.