Substituting tech-speak gobbledy-gook for true intelligence and loaded with silly faux-dramatic one-liners, Untraceable is like an overloaded truck, wobbling along at constant risk of tipping over, yet carrying cargo – in the form of the talented Diane Lane – that prevents it from entirely collapsing to the pavement in a confused heap.
Director Gregory Hoblit and the film’s three screenwriters faced an interesting challenge – how do you make a story that’s largely set on the internet lively enough to hold the interest of audiences. Their decision was to do it first by replacing the real world of pear-shaped nebbish cyber experts with perky FBI Special Agent Jennifer Marsh (Lane) and her wry sidekick Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks), and then treat their internet prospecting for cyber-crooks like Peter Sellers’ war room in Dr. Strangelove. Sure, the action is still mainly on a computer monitor (boring…), yet Hoblit has his actors rushing about excited enough to distract us from the fact that we’re just talking about trouble in the nether world of online.
Of course, Hoblit goes much further than just having energized cops pursuing online evildoers. He also heaps the movie with mounds of unpleasant gore. You see, Marsh and Dowd aren’t just after credit card-stealing identity thieves here; they’re also after a particularly well (and ridiculously unrealistically) concealed cyber mass-murderer. The gimmick here is that this psycho is capturing people (who just happen to be folks from Marsh and Dowd’s hometown of Portland, Oregon) and slowly torturing them to death. The rapidity of which is determined by the viewership of Mr. CyberSlasher’s web site, where the full carnage is streamed live. So it’s the fascination of internet addicts – and the resulting massive viewership of the site – that’s expediting the demise, first of a cat, then an innocent fellow who learned the hard way that there’s no such thing as free hockey tickets with no strings attached, and then one of our heroes.
The problem here, of course, is that the whole point of the internet is that physical distance is virtually eliminated as an issue, yet in a non-science fiction world, it’s impossible to make a movie where the heroes are located in Portland while the sicko webkiller is in Bali or Uzbekistan. As a result, while Untraceable pretends to be a hip thriller of the internet age, it still ends up defaulting to old style coincidence and phoney physical proximity to create the face-to-face conflict that’s essential to making a thriller work. Or at least essential when the filmmakers are working as conventionally as Hoblit and company.
Untraceable is essentially a mediocre thriller dressed in a ‘cutting edge’ costume that the audience can see is coming apart at the seams. The internet gimmick, in addition to being absurd (this monster simply can’t be taken offline, as if his home internet link is somehow impenetrable), is really just a half-baked premise for a movie that quickly slides back into the standard thriller material of heart-pounding police raids, children in peril and our brilliant heroes figuring out the whodunit using good old fashioned Sherlock Holmes deduction.
Lane, who gives virtually every movie she appears in instant credibility, is earnest and reasonably convincing as a single parent FBI computer expert, while Hanks is typically bland and mildly likeable. The rest of the cast, including Billy Burke and Joseph Cross, is forgettable as the mediocre screenplay.
Neither terrible nor memorable, Untraceable is the sort of movie that lives up to its name – within an hour of seeing it, memories of it will vanish without a trace.
Neither terrible nor memorable, Untraceable is the sort of movie that lives up to its name – within an hour of seeing it, memories of it will vanish without a trace.- Brian Webster
Untraceable is prototype Internet conspiracy drivel, with a hackneyed plot years too late and a simple premise of good cops and innocents against sickos.- Jamie Gillies
