Untraceable: Released Jan 25th, 2008
Runtime: 100 minutes.
Diane Lane, Colin Hanks, Mary Beth Hurt, Joseph Cross, Billy Burke, Peter Lewis, Jesse Tyler Ferguson.
Director: Gregory Hoblit.
Writers: Robert Fyvolent, Mark Brinker, Allison Burnett.
Plot outline: In this cyberthriller, a serial killer uses an untraceable website and custom-built contraptions to kill his victims, using the penchant of far too many human beings to watch snuff or snuff-like footage. Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) is the FBI agent who finds the website.
MPAA Rating: R for grisly violence and torture.
Official trailer:

The Good

Diane Lane (Unfaithful, Under the Tuscan Sun, Must Love Dogs) does shine sometimes in this cyberthriller, but it’s not until about the last half-hour – which is the best part, as is to be excpected of any thriller. Untraceable picks up and actually gets edge of the seat exciting. And horrific. Really horrific. So is it thriller or horror? Not sure.

I’m not going to reveal who the killer is but I will say that he was not only cast very well but probably directed well, too. At least in terms of his very creepy facial gestures.

The slow unravelling of the killer’s motivation is part of what eventually drives the movie forwards. But I think they reveal it a bit too soon and it kills the interest level a bit. But in the last 30 minutes or so, the “edge of the seat” stuff begins, with multiple twists and turns.

The Bad

Diane Lane looks pale, very tired and unethused in Untraceable, not to mention not particularly happy with having to plug Capital One, OnStar and some other advertisers. It makes the dialogue incredibly awkward.

The movie also gives us very little detail about the characters, so it’s tough to feel any empathy with them. As mentioned below, it feels more like an extended episode of a police procedural TV show than a movie, with layers of each character revealed only a little tiny bit at a time.

The Ugly

Director Gregory Hoblit has some Hill Streeet Blues, NYPD Blue, and L.A. Law in his background, and unfortunately it shows in this movie. In fact, the movie almost feels like someone wanted to launch yet another police procedural series but decided to forego a two-hour TV pilot and went with a feature film. It lacked a great deal in the opening.

The first 15-25 minutes of Untraceable is unwatchable, full of excruciating dialogue that sounds like the worst episode of any FBI/ police procedural, where the mega-geek on staff spews a verbal diarrhea of computer and hacking terms you’ve never heard and don’t care about. I know what they all mean, but the over-explanation is painful. Had they simply stated what was happening and not crammed not the over-explanation into three minutes, the opening would have been far more exciting.

What’s worse is watching Diane Lane’s face when she’s inserting commercial plugs for OnStar, CapitalOne, and Blue Sky ISP. There’s also a visual plug for Microsoft’s Windows operating system. You can just “see” that Lane doesn’t like doing it, and it makes watching just painful.

They also create a new cliche: it’s a jungle in there. But while it’s already evident online that too many of us are voyeurs and even have a penchant for snuff or snuff-like video, it’s hard to buy that new cliche. Why? Because the movie doesn’t feel like a science fiction film but it kind of is. The killer’s contraptions are nonsense.

There are devices that can convert electrical impluse to physical actions, but I seriously doubt there is currently any electro-mechanical way to rig a setup where the number of visitors to a website will control the necessary switches needed to trigger all the devices used to kill the victims. And yet, this is the premise of the movie, that the killer has come up with such a way.

In truch, if there is a way, I’m really glad they didn’t reveal it. However, the movie tries too hard not to explain it, in really awkward ways. For example, the killer tells one victim that he likes to “build stuff, contraptions,” and the movie leaves it at that. It draws too much attention to the fact that he figured out how, but without any further explanation – it’s left hanging.

Anyone in the audience that is tech-savvy is probably wondering WTF, and now that their attention is drawn to it, are realizing how many problems with this concept there are. (And that’s not even including the “fact” that massive surge in electricity usage could probably be traced, but this is never mentioned.)

The Summary

I’m personally imagining how Jodie Foster would have done this one, and I think her version would have been leaps and bounds ahead. Not that Lane did anything other than act in Untraceable, but I’m just saying. Untraceable has it moments but it generally falls short of what it could have been. Even still, it was #5 in box office receipts upon its opening last weekend.

Maybe I’m reading too much into things, but I really wouldn’t be surprised if this was turned into a TV series. Though there’ll need to be a lot more character development, not to mention something strong to distinguish from the multitude of police procedurals already on TV. Because there was very little that stood out in the movie aside from the bad dialogue, the serial killer, and his extremely gory way of killing.