Rating: 2 Pulses
Diane Lane, Billy Burke,
Colin Hanks, Joseph Cross
Directed by Gregory Hoblit
Rated R
If only Untraceable had lived up to its name I might never have known this movie existed. Instead, I gladly wasted two hours of my life so you don’t have to.
In Untraceable, Diane Lane (Under the Tuscan Sun, Unfaithful) plays Jennifer, the strong heroine with a hint of grief in her sugar-glazed eye. As a single mom who lives with her mother, Jennifer balances her responsibilities at home with her job in the apparently-always-raining Northwest where she has the exciting duty of sitting at a computer opposite Colin Hanks tracking Internet criminals.
The action, which consists of the two characters sitting at their computers looking horrified, begins when Lane is given a link to the website killwithme.com, where she is disgusted to witness the murder of Lulu, a helpless house cat in an anonymous basement. The catch is the killer’s contraptions are calibrated to be more effective the more viewers the site gets, and as the victims change from the kitty to the human kind, the patronage of the site rapidly increases.
The statement the killer and this movie seem to make is that there are no such things as innocent bystanders, that viewing is active rather than passive, and that the viewer is at least somewhat responsible for what is being viewed.
The killer attempts to illuminate his profound mirror to society at one point, but fails where the movie fails. The killer’s revenge motive and the flashes of excitement in his eye belie him to be the harbinger of truth he claims he is, and the fact that the main draw of the movie is a series of less clever Saw-like torture devices is in direct contrast to the movie’s apparent condemnation of the pleasure Americans derive from watching these gore-for-gore’s-sake gore fests.
In the end, Untraceable is a formulaic prime-time crime drama posing as a feature film. The plot is merely a premise and the actors merely there to play their parts of detective, friend, killer, etc., with the same gusto of a Jersey Mike’s employee making a sandwich.
This type of movie has been made countless times before and will be made countless times again. My guess is that in a couple of years the only place you will be able to track down this bore is in the $5.50 bin at Wal-Mart.
