“Untraceable” is the latest entry in an increasingly crowded field of torture porn movies, although with Diane Lane as its star, it gives itself away as soft-core porn. If they wanted the hard stuff, they obviously would have gotten Jodie Foster.
Like a lot of porn, “Untraceable” is seductive. It sucks you in, then later you feel like you need to take a shower. The story is driven along by an idea that’s as ingenious as it is insidious: A string of torture-murders is being streamed live on the Internet, and the more people click onto the site, the faster the killer’s helpless playthings die.
The problem, of course, is that to play along with this plot conceit, we have to watch what becomes a series of snuff films, so we are both complicit in the horror, and one step removed from it. As various instruments of agony are unleashed on the trussed-up victims, a tote board counts the number of unique visitors who have logged on to watch. As the numbers spin upward, faster and faster, the torture increases.
The first clue that the plot is going to revolve around a cat-and-mouse game between the cyber-killer and FBI computer crimes agent Jennifer Marsh (Lane) is the identity of the initial victim: an actual cat, who dies a slow, grisly death, streamed live on www.killwithme.com. (Psycho-killer, q’est-ce que c’est?)
Marsh’s partner in the Portland cyber-crimes unit is Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks), and when he isn’t prattling on about the blind dates he meets through the Internet, he and Marsh are speaking to each other in computerese. We hear a lot about “black-holed IPs,” “botnets” and “Trojans,” establishing their fluency in hackerspeak as we watch Marsh’s fingers fly across the keyboard at a rate previously attained by few humans.
If you’re paying attention, “Untraceable” often seems to go out of its way to tip off what’s coming, so that it’s hard to tell whether the film’s writers are lazy, clumsy or just painfully obvious.
Many of these shortcomings are heaped on Dowd, the sidekick whose anonymous Web hookups seem increasingly unwise as the death toll mounts – if not to him, certainly to us. Dowd also remarks while watching one victim die in agony that if only the guy knew Morse code, he could blink his location into the camera. What an interesting idea! Wonder if it’ll ever come up again.
In one early scene, Marsh is stuck in a traffic jam, and for no particularly good reason, activates the OnStar system in her car. She gets directions from the disembodied voice of someone at OnStar who has been using a computer to track her location. Then she drives home.
On its own, this scene has so little merit that it invites suspicion that later, somebody else – the killer? Vice President Dick Cheney? – is going to share an OnStar moment with Marsh. Sure enough, when we get to one of the movie’s most thrilling scenes, it is bisected by the picture’s most ludicrous line of dialogue. In a panic, Marsh calls detective Eric Box (Billy Burke), the cop she’s been working with, and screams, “He hacked into my car!”
Not with a crowbar, mind you. With a modem.
Despite a trail of corpses with boiled skin the movie leaves behind, the true villainy “Untraceable” seems eager to expose is the nerd mob of our collective nightmare: the Internet. The Amazon dot-comming of murder.
This subtext begins to feel a little preachy, until at last the picture reveals both the identity and the motive of the killer, and director Gregory Hoblit finds some by-the-numbers thriller moments to bring the movie home. Hoblit directed “Fracture” last year, a crime thriller that was the cinematic equivalent of a good paperback mystery. But “Untraceable” is something far more lurid, and far less mysterious. And in the end, not much fun.
‘Untraceable’
** 1/2
Rated R (some prolonged sequences of strong gruesome violence, profanity)
Cast Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks, Mary Beth Hurt
Director Gregory Hoblit
Writers Robert Fyvolent, Mark R. Brinker, Allison Burnett
Running time 1 hour, 40 minutes
Contact Bruce Newman at bnewman@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5004.
