Untraceable
* 1/2
Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks
Directed by Gregory Hoblit
Rated R
Opens Friday
One day Hollywood will make a movie about the Internet that doesn’t completely misunderstand and/or malign the way it functions and the people who spend much of their time using it (which at this point is practically everyone), but Untraceable certainly is not that movie. No matter how much technobabble Lane’s FBI cybercrimes agent Jennifer Marsh spouts at her superiors, Untraceable still feels like a movie made by people with only a passing familiarity with why anyone spends time online, what they do there and what it all might mean for the future of society.
That misunderstanding certainly doesn’t stop the movie from occasionally pontificating awkwardly about the dehumanizing effects of online voyeurism, though, scolding the audience for watching video clips of gruesome accidents and then following that up with a graphic depiction of complicated torture straight out of the Saw series. Untraceable’s hypocrisy would be maddening if everything else about the movie weren’t already 10 times stupider and more infuriating.
Following pretty much every cliché known to the serial-killer genre, Untraceable has its particular psychopath broadcasting his grisly killings online, with the speed at which his victims die determined by how many sickos (just like the people who watch this movie!) log on to his website. Jennifer and her geeky sidekick (Hanks) track the killer with help from a local detective (Burke), going through the motions of fights with bureaucratic superiors, noisy break-ins just after the killer has left and ominous forays into darkened rooms. Of course the killer eventually sets his sights on Jennifer herself, because no female cop in a mainstream thriller has stayed out of harm’s way since the world first met Clarice Starling.
Although Hoblit has made his share of passable-to-more-than-passable thrillers (Primal Fear, Fallen, Fracture), here he and his three screenwriters generate essentially no suspense, showing us the killer early on and then having Jennifer solve the whole case in one rushed, exposition-heavy scene. Instead of genuine tension, we get cheap gross-outs ripped off from movies like Hostel, making Untraceable into torture porn for housewives.
Possibly the biggest victim here is Lane herself, a talented actress who looks like she’s gritting her teeth to make it through this nasty, poorly conceived mess. One can’t help but wonder if the lead role was passed over by Julianne Moore and Ashley Judd and Halle Berry before it finally came down to the reliable but not particularly famous Lane, and she rightfully treats it like the unwanted hand-me-down it appears to be. Just like the killer’s website, Untraceable could and should be easily shut down, if only no one bothered to pay attention to it.