‘Untraceable’:
Don’t bother

At the Movies
By Senitra Horbrook

Untraceable is almost unbearable.
Directed by Gregory Hoblit, Untraceable is a disappointing thriller starring Diane Lane. Hoblit is the man behind last year’s much better thriller, Fracture, so I was surprised at the substandard level of Untraceable.
The enticing previews reeled me in, and judging by the beginning, I thought the movie was going to be pretty good. It really goes wrong at the end. Until then, the plot was still bad, but relatively believable.
Diane Lane is FBI agent Jennifer Marsh, trying to track down the creator of a web site called killwithme.com. The site shows people (and a poor kitty) in deplorable situations, and the more people who log on, the faster the victim dies. The site is, of course, untraceable, even by the FBI and the Portland (Oregon) Police Department’s finest.
Instead of being an intelligent thriller, Untraceable seemed more like a PG version of the Saw movies. By the way, Untraceable is rated R; it only seems tame compared to the gore fests of Saw. In Untraceable, the psycho killer (who is revealed far too early and for no apparent reason) has a bone to pick because of a tragedy in his life. All his victims are linked in an unexpected way.
What really ruins the movie is the portrayal of his victims’ deaths. If you’re an animal lover, be sure to cover your eyes when you see the kitten. His human victims are not much better off — methods of death include burning someone with heat lamps and taking out another by making the victim sit in a tank with battery acid. The killer in Untraceable appears to get the same kind of sick pleasure as Jigsaw from the Saw movies.
I wasn’t quite sitting on the edge of my seat, but there was a fair amount of suspense. That suspense is mostly due to the stupidity of Lane’s character. Once she becomes a target of the killer, she makes some pretty dumb moves for an FBI agent, including spending time alone in a deserted hotel.
This flick is a step backward for Lane, as I much prefer her in recent films like Hollywoodland and Unfaithful. Lane is a good actress and doesn’t do anything wrong here . . . in fact her effort seems quite earnest. The strike against her here is that she accepted a role that squanders her talents.
Colin Hanks (30-year-old son of actor Tom Hanks) has a pretty important and humorous role as a colleague of Lane’s character. He makes the most of it, but I think he’s someone audiences will be seeing more of in the future — he has the same charm as his famous father.
One interesting aspect of the film is the Web site; the FBI and police claim that anyone who visits it is responsible for murder. That doesn’t stop millions of people from logging on and participating in the online chat. It does say something terrible about our voyeuristic society, yet that message is muddled because the movie focuses too much on trying to make people die in the most violent and torturous scenarios.
The idea in the movie is that it’s wrong to watch people die, yet it is exactly what the folks behind Untraceable are subjecting the audience to — and that’s quite disturbing. ••
Movie Grade: D