This film wants to be “Traffic” for online crimes instead of drugs, but the impact is softened at every turn because of a faux-Crash vibe. The film keeps telling us that everyone is human, and that soft emotional center really undercuts the movie’s would-be grittiness.
What Works: Three interconnected stories following a teenager who meets a “girl” online but it’s really his bully classmate…A married couple (Alexander Skarsgard looking eeirly like Dwight from The Office, and the always luminous Paula Patton) who are the victims of an online identity thief…and a reporter (Andrea Riseborough, a cross between Angelina Jolie and Arianna Huffington) wants to do a story about an 18-year-old boy hustling on a sex website. Any of these stories probably would have been too-slight to build a film on their own, but they work well together. And their are many strong performances. I particularly liked a somber Jason Bateman as the dad of the bullied teen, who’s jolted into learning more about his son, and Paula Patton is achingly vulnerable as a grieving mother who thinks she’s joined a support website, but actually enters an entirely different hell.
What Doesn’t Work: The reporter/boy-toy storyline never fully takes off because the film can’t decide if Riseborough feels anything sexual for him or not. Watching them awkwardly dance around it is a lesson in diminishing cinematic results. Likewise, the Paula Patton/Alexander Skarsgard storyline is robbed of a proper ending. As the movie goes on, the Bateman-as-shocked-father storyline takes over and the others become less important. So you’re talking about one full movie with two others robbed of resolution. AND the film could have been better if it was more interested in cyber-crime. As is, it’s more invested in the emotions, and saying that no one is really a bad guy (in all three story lines, even the villain is given huge doses of empathy). Well, it might have been a little stronger if we’d been allowed to glance the seedier side (and characters) involved in online sex-shops and identity theft rings. As is, they’re either never shown or kept at a distance.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Making the “Traffic” of cyber-crime films is a terrific idea, and I hope someone actually makes that movie. Identity theft, online gambling, cyber-sex-sites, and cyber-theft has never been more common, and when Steven Soderbergh leaves his temporary retirement from movies, this would be some great ground for him to cover.