Street Date: May 13

Official Synopsis:
Within the FBI there exists a division dedicated to investigating and prosecuting criminals on the internet. Welcome to the front lines of the war on cybercrime, where special Agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) and Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) have seen it all...until now. A tech-savvy internet predator is displaying his graphic murders on his own website and the fate of each of his tormented captives is left in the hands of the public: the more hits his site gets, the faster his victims die. When this game of cat and mouse becomes personal, Marsh and her team must race against the clock to track down this technical mastermind who is virtually untraceable.

  
Our Take:
The quote on the cover for Untraceable calls it the “Silence of the Lambs of the internet age.”

Umm… no.

I don’t know who the guy they quoted is, but I hope he was either misquoted or paid a lot of money, because Untraceable doesn’t even come close to reaching the heights of brilliance that Silence of the Lambs does. That being said, Untraceable is a perfectly serviceable thriller that, while somewhat predictable, is fairly entertaining.

Clearly influenced by the popularity of films such as Hostel and Saw, the movie sees a serial killer link his victims up to gruesome methods of torture that are broadcast on the internet. The more people that click on the website the murders are streaming on, the faster the victims suffer and die. The torture/death scenes are pretty disturbing and unsettling, but luckily there’s only a few of them.

Diane Lane is good as always and Colin Hanks, who I’ve been a fan of since his days on Roswell, gets a pretty big role which I’m happy to see. Even if his storyline plays out in a completely predictable manner, the pair works well together on screen. This isn’t really a movie about characters or screen presence, though, and it moves from thrill to thrill pretty quickly. What I do like about the film very much is the way the detectives solve the mystery of who the serial killer is. It’s actually a pretty clever string of events that the writers have strung together to set up the mystery, and the payout is pretty solid.

As for extra features, this is a pretty standard DVD release, with nothing above and beyond the usual bonus material fare.

* Audio Commentary - With director Gregory Hoblit, producer Hawk Koch and production designer Paul Eads.  

* Tracking Untraceable – An interview with Hoblit and the film’s writer..

* Untraceable: The Personnel Files – The cast discusses their characters.

* The Blueprint of Murder – A look at the more technical side of the production.

* The Anatomy of Murder – Focuses on the design of the torture/murder set-ups.

Ultimately, Untraceable is a perfectly watchable yet instantly forgettable movie, with a few moments of good detective work thrown in. It’s worth watching on a night when there’s nothing else left on the video store shelves.

Overall Picture:
Movie: C+
DVD: B-

- Mike Spring

Editor