Director: Gregory Hoblit
Ever since "The Silence of the Lambs," Hollywood has had an enduring fascination with serial killers. "Untraceable" helps brings the genre up to date with this taut little tale about a serial killer who uses the Internet to kill his victims. It's silly, nasty and 's I must confess 's it's also pretty entertaining.
Agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) tracks Internet crime for the FBI by night so she can be with her young daughter during the day. She pursues fraudsters, pedo-philes and various other nasty types while sipping on a nice mug of coffee in her Portland office.
A new Web site called "Kill With Me" is brought to her attention by the police in which a kitten is killed live online. Marsh knows that the site is based locally in Portland but she can't pinpoint it for some incredibly complicated technological reasons which are explained at length but which made almost no sense to me.
When Marsh tries to close down the Web site, it simply reopens using another IP address, this time with a live feed of a man who is clearly in danger. The serial killer has hooked the man up to a deadly contraption which is directly linked to the number of hits the site receives. In other words, the more people visit the Web site, the surer it is that the man will die.
The premise is ridiculous, to be sure, but somehow "Untraceable" pulls it off. It's a solemn film that poses some uncomfortable questions about our relationship with the Internet and the spectacle of suffering in particular.
The serial killer strikes again and again as Marsh and her team desperately try to catch him using all their technological expertise. The killer believes he is not technically guilty of murder because his victims are actually killed by the prurience of the Web-surfing public. Unsurprisingly, people just can't resist looking at live pictures of a man being killed by public prurience.
Diane Lane is as likeable as ever in her role and her presence saves the film from becoming gratuitous, "Saw"'slike nastiness. The scriptwriters also do their best to account for some of the more far-fetched, even ludicrous aspects of the plot. It seems you have to be an expert in engineering, chemistry, physics and computers to be a serial killer these days.
But "Untraceable" is nonetheless a disturbing and engaging film that leaves you with a lingering sense of unease.
Now showing in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
