Underwhelming Directorial Debut

Rating: 3/10 (3 January 2018)

The San Fransisco movie reviewer phrased it very well when he wrote, "at a certain point, everyone watching this movie will ask, 'why should I care about any of this?'" The question hangs in the air very early during the film, and it's never really answered-- at least not in the 1 1/2 hours that I watched it. Yeah, I bailed.
I think that it sits currently at 7.6 on this site and 80% on Rotten Tomatoes because so many people WANT Sorkin's directorial debut to be great... But it's just.... not.
Molly brags about her accomplishments and her intelligence throughout the movie (yes, the braggadocio is boring in itself) , but in the end she just exploited simple concepts from someone who she describes as an "idiot." Alright... So you supposedly put off attending law school at an Ivy League school to put yourself in the feds' cross-hairs with this "idiot's" schemes? Brilliant.
There are also the lacking technical aspects of the editing and camerawork such as the ESPN-like side panels when the guys are playing poker. The minutiae and graphics are mind-numbingly boring to novices and professionals alike. Jessica Chastain does voice over while they play with so much garrulity and monotony. It would have been much easier just to SHOW the game. Instead of, "Max thinks that Jake has a jack, which would give him two of a kind, but Jake is overselling his bluff a bit too much which tipped off Max and made him--" just show it. We can see it: "That dude had a great hand, but he tipped it off, so the other guy folded." Wow. So complicated. It doesn't require paragraphs.
There is also dull legalistic minutiae in which Molly is showcasing her intellect and supposedly correcting her own lawyer in the process. Again, who cares? She didn't want to actually apply that intellect in the way that her lawyer did, so now she must pay millions to him instead. Wow. Brilliant.
The acting is shaky. Jessica Chastain is undeniably sexy, but she has all of the charisma of a DMV worker. For me, she just can't pull off leading lady.
I majored in psychology, so I want to conclude this review by stating that it's ironic that Sorkin focused on the minutiae of poker and the law, but he is apparently lost on the details of my science. At one point when Molly is an adolescent she says to her father that she thinks that Freud was a "moron" and a "quack." Her father bristles at these insults and says something like, "I'M NOT A QUACK." Well, although I respect Freud immensely and most of the theories of modern psychology are derived from his theories, even during the early '90s (when I assume this exchange occurred) few psychologists were heavily invested in the Freudian paradigm. I don't know why so many writers think that psychologists are obsessed with Freudian ideas. Anyway, this film is a sh** show.