Untraceable

Just as you are starting to think, “Hey, this isn’t so bad,” Untraceable takes a dive off the cliff even the Russian judge will give a perfect score to.

Diane Lane stars as Jennifer Marsh – a Portland-based FBI agent in the cyber crimes division. She spends her nights trying to catch identity thieves and scam artists, but her newest case is chilling everyone to the bone. A new website has popped up, and it features the live, streamed-as-it-happens, brutal killings of people lured into the clutches of its sadistic webmaster. As more people log onto the site, the faster each subject is killed in a bizarre, twisted manner.

Can Jennifer catch this madman? What is his goal? Why is he doing it?

Untraceable is good enough until director Gregory Hoblit and writers Robert Fyvolent, Mark Brinker and Allison Burnett drag out the ending and throw away any semblance of logic to deliver one of the most clichéd scenarios in the history of movies. While we do see the killer a bit too early in the movie, Hoblit generally does a decent job drawing in the audience and making us wonder who this person might be and why he is committing such heinous crimes, and doesn’t overplay the whole internet angle too much. We get to play some detective, but the mystery comes together too fast and somewhat out of nowhere, leaving Hoblit to rely too long on our natural curiosity about why and how this is all happening. However, once everything is solved, Hoblit and crew don’t know how to let go.

If you put me or anyone reading this review in an editing suite for a day, we could trim 10 – 15 minutes off Untraceable to make it more interesting and surprising. Once the movie has revealed the killer, and the motives for his crimes, it is over for everyone involved, except for Hoblit and the writers.

They send the killer after victims who do not fit into the original motivation for why he set up the site, which only makes it all go on too long, towards a conclusion we can easily predict, and provides an ending that is cheap and stupid. We don’t need the typical woman-in-peril scenario played out over and over and over again, especially when this movie is about a tough as nails female FBI agent, even if she does cry too much.

Lane is solid as the investigator, but I wish Hoblit and the writers didn’t throw in a bunch of unnecessary scenes designed to show her “vulnerability”. Can’t she just be a tough investigator without all of the girlie stuff?

Untraceable is rated R for some prolonged sequences of strong gruesome violence, and language.