Untraceable is one of those movies that tries to Say Something while luridly pandering to an audience that isn’t likely to be listening.
Diane Lane is a gifted actor who has made more than a few really good films. Here, she plays FBI cyber-crimes specialist, Jennifer Marsh. When she gets a tip about a website called killwithme.com, she investigates – to discover that a kitten has been tortured and killed live online. She and her partner, Griffin Dowd [Colin Hanks] try to persuade their boss, Richard Brooks [Peter Lewis] that this is only the beginning and –in the first of his wrong decisions – he ignores them.
Next thing you know, a pilot named Herbert Miller is kidnapped off the street and killed, gruesomely on the website. Brooks refuses Marsh’s request to start up a taskforce because he’s only killed a kitten and one man. When the next victim is a well-liked former TV reporter, though, Brooks finally realizes that there’s something afoot. Unfortunately, it’s too late for two men and when he goes public to try to prevent people from visiting the website [the more hits the site gets, the faster the victim dies] he has the exactly the opposite effect [and yes, Marsh and Dowd do try to persuade him not to do the press conference – he really isn’t the brightest bulb on the chandelier].
Add to the mix a police detective named Eric Box [Billy Burke], to give us a potential [I said potential] love interest for Marsh – and yet another person who is smarter than Brooks – and you have a character who gets to share a bed with Marsh – her under the covers, him on top – and provide a key bit of knowledge at precisely the most important moment [and the movie’s funniest moment as someone comments on his name].
How clever is the killer [Joseph Cross]? Once he knows the FBI are after him, he plants a “backdoor Trojan” in a game that Marsh’s daughter, Annie [Perla Haney-Jardine], gets as a gift from a friend and learns everything that she has on her computer – including where she, her daughter and her mother live. This leads to a particularly creepy sequence where Annie sees their house come up on her monitor. Our killer also seems to have unlimited access to some perverse version of Toys ‘R’ Us – and some kind of stealth mode, since he takes his victims in public.
While attempting to say something about the evil possibilities of the internet [everybody, now: Well, DUH!], director Gregory Hoblit and his writing team go out of their way to include scenes like the one were heat lamps turn on victims flesh into a series of bubbling boils, or where the camera lovingly lingers over another victim’s arm as it sheds bits of flesh as the water in which he’s mostly submerged turns to sulphuric acid. Then there’s the guy who’s turned into a haemophiliac and bleeds to death through his nose, mouth and the words “kill with me” that have been scratched into his chest.
What’s really sad is that Hoblit does a good job of setting the film up and building mood and suspense through pacing and music. In a lot of ways, Untraceable could have been a really good thriller instead of the gorno thing that it wound up becoming. Despite the best efforts of the cast, this film is one that may well make you want to wash your soul out with soap afterward. If that’s your idea of fun, go for it.
The fewer people go to this sort of thing, the sooner they’ll stop making it. As a wise man once said, “A well-made piece of crap is still a piece of crap.”
Final Grade: D
“Untraceable” is a techo-thriller about a female FBI agent in Oregon who uses computers to track down criminals. She meets her match with someone who has a webiste showing torture and murder which is controlled by the number of viewers. Gruesome and falls apart toward the end.
GRADE = “C+”