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Diane Lane and Colin Hanks chase down an online murderer in
Untraceable.
Sometimes
a few words say it all. Here are some of my notes compiled
while watching Untraceable, a rather unremarkable
suspense thriller:
“Nice premise. How they catch the killer should be
interesting.”
“Diane
Lane
is fine, but she looks better with long hair.”
“The torture is not very graphic, thankfully.”
“The ending is too easy. And shouldn’t there be a plot
twist?”
“Disappointed.”
Lane plays FBI cybercrimes 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’d better hurry because the more people who
visit the site, the quicker the victim dies, whether by
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 halfway through).
It’s surprising that more cybercrime 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 cybercrime 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 evidenced 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.
Untraceable
is not quite unwatchable, but it is uninteresting, undynamic
and unfulfilling.
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