At The Movies: Swiped is a Bumble biopic that is too safe and too soon

Swiped (M18)

110 minutes, premieres on Disney+ on Sept 19

★★☆☆☆

The story: This unauthorised biography of Whitney Wolfe Herd (English actress Lily James), founder of popular women-first dating app Bumble, opens in 2012, as the recent university graduate dives into the world of tech start-ups. It is a cut-throat space filled with founders vying for the attention of venture capitalists. In this mostly male arena, Wolfe Herd gets dismissed as a lightweight, but uses her good looks to her advantage. She meets another start-up founder Sean (Ben Schnetzer), and he convinces her to join his firm as head of marketing. Among his products is a then unpromising dating app, Tinder. She sees potential in it and throws her energies into making it a success.

This film describes the arc of a woman making it to the top of the business pyramid, joining biopics like Joy (2015, starring Jennifer Lawrence) and Coco Before Chanel (2009, starring Audrey Tautou) in celebrating the journey of a unique individual.

What makes it different from other woman-against-the-odds stories is the contemporary setting – it covers the period from 2012 up to just a few years ago – and the fact that its subject is still relatively young (Wolfe Herd is 36) and still the head of Bumble, the company the American founded in 2014.

This exposes Swiped’s greatest weakness – not enough time has passed for there to be anything more than a superficial look at her life. Also, she is alive, rich and armed with lawyers, so this portrait is devoid of juice. There is almost nothing here about her psychological make-up, which tends to be the most interesting thing about studies of self-made millionaires.

Wolfe Herd has drive and smarts – she successfully cajoles an entire sorority house into downloading Tinder, for example – but viewers will have no idea what drives her, nor where her grit and intellect come from.

Director and co-writer Rachel Lee Goldenberg mines news reports and court documents arising from – spoiler alert – a lawsuit that is foundational to the birth of Bumble. The non-disclosure agreement signed by Wolfe Herd as part of the settlement means that she could not participate in this project even if she had wanted to.

The court case and other moments in the life of a tech entrepreneur are captured in scenes that show Wolfe Herd – at first an innocent who views start-up life as a fun adventure – slowly corrupted by success and the influence of a male-dominated workplace, a space one journalist character describes as a toxic “bro zone”.

Backstabbing bro personalities abound in Swiped, each resembling the villainous character of Erlich Bachman (portrayed by T.J. Miller) in the HBO series Silicon Valley (2014 to 2019).

The rise of Bumble is framed as the direct consequence of Wolfe Herd’s exposure to that toxicity, which feels like a plot convenience, worsened by the way supporting characters vanish from the story.

English actor Dan Stevens – who, like lead actress James, broke through on the Netflix period drama Downton Abbey (2010 to 2015) – stands out as Russia-born tech entrepreneur Andrey Andreev. For some unknown but hugely entertaining reason, Stevens chose to make his character speak like Borat.

Hot take: This shallow, legally sanitised biopic of a tech founder lacks depth and arrives too soon.