 Untraceable
Movie
Untraceable **
By Dan Hudak
Sometimes a few words can say it all. Here are some of my notes
compiled while watching “Untraceable,” a rather unremarkable suspense
thriller:
o “Nice premise.
How they catch the killer should be interesting.”
o “Diane Lane is
fine, but she looks better with long hair.”
o “The torture
is not very graphic, thankfully.”
o “The ending is
too easy. And shouldn’t there be a plot twist?”
o
“Disappointed.”
Lane plays F.B.I. cyber crimes
investigator Jennifer Marsh, a single mom who’s good at what she does
and has a nice rapport with her co-worker, Griffin Dowd (Colin “stop
calling me Tom’s son” Hanks). She gets a tip that the web site
www.killwithme.com (go ahead and click it, web readers) features live
streaming video of people being tortured to death, and soon she and
Detective Eric Box (Billy Burke) are tracking the killer (Joseph
Cross), whom they believe lives nearby. But they better hurry: the more
people who visit the site the quicker the victim dies, be it through
lethal injection or severe burns from heat lamps.
The movie is just plain dull. The
killer’s torture contraptions look like second-hand rejects from “Saw,”
and the story is little more than your typical cops-chasing-the-bad guy
tedium. Director Gregory Hoblit (“Fracture”) doesn’t even offer the
suspense of trying to figure out who the murderer is (we’re told about
half way through).
It’s surprising that more cyber crime
thrillers haven’t been made in recent years, especially considering how
prominent the Internet has become. Sandra Bullock’s “The Net” had
reasonable success when released in 1995, and elements of Internet
chicanery have been a recurring cinematic motif ever since, but as a
genre the cyber crime picture has yet to come into its own.
“Untraceable” doesn’t offer much
progress in this regard, but it does partially explain why the genre
has remained stagnant. Early in the film Jennifer explains to her boss
(Peter Lewis) why they can’t track the killer, and there’s so much
technical talk about servers, domains, IP addresses and Russia that you
need the Geek Squad to figure out what’s going on. If something is this
complex then we probably do have some time before the genre takes hold.
Fortunately the essentials are implied by the title, so you don’t feel
lost for very long.
The movie has elements of social
commentary in that people seem to love watching others at their worst,
as is evident by the popularity of reality television. Having the
individuals who hit the site become accomplices in the murder is a
clever idea, but at no point are there any ramifications for endorsing
the murder, which means there’s no critique of the mass populace for
embracing such crass entertainment. It is for this reason that the
movie fails to achieve the subtle metaphor it was not-so-subtly chasing
after.
“Untraceable” is not quite unwatchable,
but it is uninteresting, un-dynamic and unfulfilling.
Contact Dan Dan@Faxts.com
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