Running time: 101 minutes
Starring: Diane Lane, Colin Hanks, Billy Burke
Rating 2 out of 10
Untraceable is certainly unlikeable, frequently unbelievable and often unwatchable. A morally questionable sub-Se7en-style serial killer chiller, it must have had Hollywood hands wringing with glee with its new spin on the alarming 'torture porn' genre, but the final product is at best misguided and at worst extremely unappealing. The concept is high tech and lowbrow. Somebody is kidnapping people, holding them in a cellar, torturing and killing them and - wait for it - streaming the whole thing live on the internet. The catch being that the more people that log on to watch, the more intense and savage the torture becomes. There's an inherent irony in this - it is arguably meant to be a comment on modern society - that seems to have completely escaped the profit-seeking filmmakers.
Of course only one cop can crack this case and it's Diane Lane, a cyber crime specialist who proves her credentials in the first ten minutes by spouting technobabble about botnets, ip addresses and the like. Lane must be either desperate for work or at the bottom of a long list of actresses to have refused such a spurious project.
Director Gregory Hoblit created Oscar-nominated work with his 1996 debut Primal Fear but here turns out a pedestrian and predictable film, in which it's always raining during the key sequences, and prevents the audience from doing any of its on work. He points the finger at a potential suspect for much of the first 45 minutes only to suddenly reveal the actual killer.
From then on it becomes a traditional cat and mouse chase with particularly unsavoury scenes of torture, while Lane's character tries to prevent her single daughter and slightly odd mother becoming involved in the killer's web. Excitement is low, there's an ending that's predictable and the whole thing is rather unpalatable.
Paul Hurley
