Untraceable

We move now into the era of the cybernetic serial killer. It is not, you may be sure, a comfortable place to live.

Untraceable is a cat-and-mouse thriller about computer-driven crime.

Diane Lane plays FBI Special Agent Jennifer Marsh, a widow and single mother who lives with her young daughter and her mom. She works in the Bureau’s Cybercrime Division, dedicated to patrolling the Internet and investigating and prosecuting cyberspace criminals.

She works in the Portland, Oregon field office along with her younger partner, played by Colin Hanks, with whom she thwarts, or tries to, the efforts of sexual predators and financial scam artists. As far as computer crime goes, she thinks she’s seen everything.

She’s wrong.

Because her latest case involves a psychopathic, tech-savvy murderer who displays his gruesome and nefarious wares – death machines and torture chambers that he sets up and displays his victims in, then streams their excruciating deaths online via webcam – on his website, killwithme.com.

For some reason – that’s what they’ve got to figure out – he puts the fates of his victims in the hands of visitors to his website: The more hits on his site, the faster the victim dies.

So this serial killer’s technological mastery to exploit the public’s morbid curiosity, bloodlust, and fascination with the sensationalistic dark side has turned visitors to his site into the murder weapon. And he renders himself virtually untraceable.

Agent Marsh, on the other hand, is not so untraceable – nor are her loved ones – and the psycho whom she’s hunting knows it.

Director Gregory Hoblit (Fracture, Hart’s War, Fallen, Primal Fear), working in the dark, dreary mode that turned Seven into such an unforgettable nightmare, offers us a compelling setup.

But the narrative developments of the second half fail to fulfill the expectations raised during the first half.

Almost surprisingly, Hoblit fails to build to the intended level of suspense. Worse, he strains awkwardly to achieve real-world relevance with the film’s indictment of our voyeuristic tendencies and lack of restraint and compassion.

But the focus on grisly, stomach-turning crimes – and the feeling that self-righteous disapproval of our addiction to sadistic violence and unimaginable torture is being trumpeted even as the film does little but display it throughout the film – creates a bad taste that never quite leaves our mouths.

And that makes the film’s seeming timeliness seem exploitative and its conclusion not only flatfootedly preachy but transparently insincere as well.

The movie, then, is, in a way, as hypocritical as the villain, beckoning its audience with graphic depictions of brutality and inhumanity.

Even the usually reliable Lane is off her game, offering several line readings so off-kilter, it seems as if she hadn’t processed her dialogue in her own mind before she delivered it for recording. As they say in the movies: another take, please.

Which goes for the film itself as well.

So we’ll download 2 stars out of 4. Untraceable is far too two-face-able to be at all embraceable.