Untraceable

Don’t get talked into seeing this distasteful movie. At the heart of “Untraceable” is a moral question that the movie deals with intelligently for the first half. If you know that someone is being tortured and eventually killed on-line, would you visit that web site? And would you visit that web site if you knew that by doing so, you increase the chances of the person dying? Obviously the filmmakers take a cynical approach to human nature. It’s much like traffic jams in Los Angeles. There might be an accident on one side of the freeway, but the other side slows down because people are busy trying to see what happened.

Jennifer March (Diane Lane) and her partner Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks, Tom’s son) work out of the Portland FBI’s cybercrime division. When Jennifer discovers a web site called killwithme, she’s understandably upset because the first victim is a small kitten, who, over a week’s time, is starved to death. The killer moves on to human victims and then it becomes a race to see if Jennifer and Griffin can identify and catch him before he selects someone else to torture and kill. For a film wanting to tackle a serious issue, they show way too many scenes of torture and gruesome death. And although Jennifer is an intelligent woman for the first half of the movie, she devolves into someone who makes stupid decisions during the second. By forcing the audience to witness these horrific deaths, director Gregory Hoblit succeeds in turning the viewers against this film. (1/28/08)