A heavy-handed would-be tragedy about modern life, Henry Alex Rubin's Disconnect addresses how the Internet and social media are driving us apart in exactly the same manner that Crash attempted to show how racism undermines every facet of human interaction. Also like Paul Haggis' movie, it gets buried under the weight of its own self-importance.
The ensemble includes Jason Bateman as a corporate lawyer named Rich Boyd. His emo teen son Ben (Jonah Bobo) becomes the victim of a cruel practical joke in which a pair of classmates create a fake Facebook account and pretend to be a girl who's interested in him. When their actions have tragic repercussions, one of the kids, Jason Dixon (Colin Ford), struggles with his feelings of guilt.
Jason is at odds with his own father Mike (Frank Grillo), an ex-cop specializing in computer crimes who now works as a private eye. Mike has been investigating a case for Cindy and Derek Hull (Paula Patton and Alexander Skarsgård), a married couple who have had their bank accounts emptied and identities stolen while their relationship is dissolving over the grief from their infant son's death.
Meanwhile, ambitious local TV reporter Nina Dunham (Andrea Riseborough) befriends an 18- year-old named Kyle (Max Thieriot) who makes his living getting people to pay to have sexual interactions with him online. She wants to do a story about his lifestyle, which leads to unexpected interest from the Feds, who want Nina to break her promise to Kyle that he would remain anonymous.
Each of these stories leads to a climactic moment of violence, and Rubin, who has already played up the melodrama of these characters' lives to a ridiculous degree, not only intercuts between three different intense confrontations, but shows all of them in extreme slow motion and scores the montage with mournful music meant to let you know exactly how epically tragic all of it is. While this over-the-top approach stays true to the determinedly serious tone Rubin takes throughout Disconnect, you can decide for yourself if consistently ridiculous is better than intermittently ridiculous.
Andrew Stern's script is full of characters so grossly self-involved or stupid that you start hoping the movie will punish them. A character as smart as Ben is, no matter how lonely, would probably try to find this girl who supposedly goes to his school before sending her intimate pictures of himself. Also, since the film can't decide if Nina is a cynical journalist or an easily suckered bleeding heart, we don't know whether her attraction to Kyle is maternal or simply sexual. As for Cindy and Derek, who spend much of the movie stalking the man Mike informs them is likely responsible for their current financial obliteration, it's never made clear that they were ever a happy couple, so there's no reason to root for them to work through their tangled emotional mess.
There's one genuinely interesting subplot in the film that actually addresses the movie's core themes in a novel and engaging way. While the two pranksters hook Ben emotionally to their made-up girl, Jason actually finds himself communicating honestly about the troubles he's having with his father and the pain he feels over his mother's death. That's a legitimately intriguing concept that would have supported a whole movie so much better than this one.
By wallowing in emotional exploitation and fears about technology, Disconnect is exactly the kind of film that will make grandparents worry needlessly for their progeny and say clueless things about "the Internets" at family gatherings. It's a tone-deaf message movie that has as much to say about your life as a Facebook status update from someone you don't know.