Movie Review: Disconnect
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
The film Disconnect might serve well for anyone engaging in anything to do with the internet. You may want to educate yourself with this one as a precursor to participating in any on-line activity. I found it to be one of those experiences that both educates and scares the social networking fun right out of you. I will now think twice before opening attachments or chatting with people I don’t know.
The story has several sub-plots going that eventually mesh together in a fairly catastrophic conclusion. Two young teenage pranksters Colin (Jason Dixon) and his buddy Frye (Aviad Bernstein) are up to no good planning a gag on an unsuspecting customer, when they notice a kid from school, Ben Boyd played by Jonah Bobo. It’s obvious that Ben is one of the quiet kids that tends to get made fun of. They set their sights to harass him. They develop a fake on-line persona of a girl that goes to their school and has a crush on Ben. Ben falls for the girl and has long cyberspace conversations with her, ultimately leading to him sending her a naked picture of himself that ends up going viral and completely ruins any kind of positive reputation he may have had.
Story number two is Ben’s parents and sister; his father is played by Jason Bateman, a successful lawyer and a disengaged husband and father who, when tragedy strikes, goes about the business of getting to the bottom of the travesty.
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Story number three is about a struggling couple; Cindy and Derek Hull (Paula Patton and Alexander Skarsgard). They have lost their young infant and instead of turning to each other, they turn to the internet. Cindy is part of an on-line grieving support-group that eventually has all the makings of a cyber affair and Derek seeks solace through internet gambling. Through careless interactions, they both end up having their identities stolen. They find that the police are absolutely worthless in rectifying the return of their money, so they turn to an internet investigator. This is where story number one comes in again. Mike Dixon (Frank Grillo), the investigator hired to help the Hulls, is the widowed father of Colin, one of the teenagers harassing Ben.
Jason Bateman in “Disconnect.” Photo by Phil Bray.
© 2013 – LD Entertainment.
Story number four involves internet porn. Nina Dunham (Andrea Riseborough) plays an investigative reporter looking for a story, she finds a child porn site and convinces the young, handsome Kyle (Max Thierot) to bare all and allow Nina to interview him anonymously for a story. She assures him that he is safe and no one will ever know. Problem is the story ends up on CNN and the FBI is now involved and wants to raid the home the site is run out of. She is forced to give up Kyle because she initially paid for his services, which of course is illegal. Her lawyer is Ben’s father.
All the stories in Disconnect do ultimately influence each other and, as I don’t think this is the greatest film ever made, how writer Andrew Stern and director Henry Rubin made this all work together was very well done. You might even go so far as to say a bit on the Matrix side of things. Disconnect is definitely worth viewing for its climax alone.
Betsy Cizek
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