Not helping matters is its barebones characters. James is a super nerd who has been coding since he was seven; Lance only thinks about getting laid; Hannah reads a lot. The other players, even major supporting characters, are so forgettable I am not sure I can list even a single trait of theirs. More than that though is the fact that I did not laugh once. Sure a smirk or smile here and there, but the movie is never all that funny.
While Swiped is terribly written but the acting is excellent, which makes the film more tolerable to watch. As James, Kendall Ryan Sanders finds a delicate balance between socially awkward and enduring. Noah Centineo is good looking and suave, and he does what he can with a thoroughly despicable character. Wulfert is charming as Hannah and almost manages to give her more than one trait, almost. The rest of the cast all suit their roles just fine, but, again, no one can rise above the script to make an impression on the viewer.
Swiped is a comedy that is not funny; granted such things are wildly subjective (e.g. I don’t like Louis CK). Beyond that though, its take on relationships is remarkably dated and coupled with its strictly heterosexual view of relationships and one-dimensional characters, there is little to engage the audience. The actors all try their best, but they can’t make the subpar script rise above sheer mediocrity.
Swiped (2018) Directed by Ann Deborah Fishman. Written by Ann Deborah Fishman. Starring Kendall Ryan Sanders, Shelby Wulfert, Noah Centineo, Kirsten Johnston, Leigh-Allyn Baker, Kalani Hilliker, George Hamilton.
4 Gummi Bears (out of 10)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Thank you for taking the time to watch and review SWIPED.
You did get a few things right in your review. The first scene is a meta reference to the prevailing tech addiction when Ashlee (played by Kalani Hilliker) tells her brother James (played by Kendall Sanders) “When are you going to interact with real people who are right in front of you?” and then she promptly goes back to her preoccupation with her own phone.
You also do concede that in SWIPED the acting is excellent and I fully agree. SWIPED is a great ensemble of fine actors – each of whom I was gratified and thrilled to direct.
However, your complaint that SWIPED paints men as only interested in no strings attached sex and women as solely interested in connecting misapprehends the essence of the movie – SWIPED is satire which by definition uses exaggeration to comment on social issues. The social issue at stake here is the question of whether hook up apps benefit females.
With the exception of Bumble which was founded by a co founder of Tinder – as far as I know, the main hook up apps available today were originated by males. In SWIPED, James Singer is the proxy for those technocrats and the thesis is that they create these apps without cognizance or care of the human consequences – particularly to females.
In SWIPED the females revolt against the status quo which dehumanizes them and this reflects the truth of the modern female consciousness as personified in the #Me Too and #Times Up movement. Like it or not – there are distinct differences between the male and female experiences of sex in general and the hook up app culture in particular. In response to your assertion that the characters are too hetero, ninety minutes is simply not long enough to delve into the nuances of the hook up experience by every type of individual on the gender, non binary and sexual spectrum. In the sequel, I will be sure to address this.
You are quite correct in feeling the 1980s with SWIPED but for the wrong reasons. Neither SWIPED nor the writer/director are stuck in the past but merely allude to a time not so long ago when people had reasonable expectations of some modicum of courtship in the mating ritual. In the 1980s dating was still a custom in modern life. The pivotal scene in SWIPED when James references “dating” to a room full of sorority sisters and is met by the reproof that none of them had been on a date is the point – tech has made dating a relic and replaced it with expectations for impersonal sex. Do some females like impersonal sex and do some males want connection? Of course, but that is the topic for another movie.
SWIPED endeavors to make a point – in a comical way – about how far we have come in depersonalizing sexual interactions. This is a topic that needs to be discussed. It can be done in a serious way as the HBO documentary similarly titled SWIPED: Hooking Up in the Digital Age does – or in a comical, satirical way that my romantic comedy SWIPED does. But it is a thoroughly modern question to ask whether the appetite for impersonal sex so deftly enabled by technology and the concomitant relegation of dating to history is the endgame people signed on for when they created their accounts on the latest hook up apps.
With love, respect and gratitude
Ann Deborah Fishman
SWIPED writer, director, producer
Sounds like one to skip which is a shame because I do like Johnston. Maybe if I see this at a Dollar Tree sale I’ll pick it up.
Good review Bobby.