Untraceable Movie Review Starring Diane Lane

April 12, 2008

Untraceable is a movie I had been looking forward to watching for a while now. After seeing some trailers which made it look pretty good I was excited to finally get to see it last night. Unfortunately for me though the movie turned out to be nowhere near as good as I had hoped and I can honestly say I thought it was a complete letdown.

The basic storyline is that F.B.I. cyber crimes specialist Jennifer Marsh (Played by Diane Lane) stumbles across a website called KillWithMe.Com which allows its viewers to control how quickly a victim dies. Starting with a tiny defenceless kitten and moving on to human victims set in a series of horrible traps and torture devices the killer invites his viewers to log on and ‘kill with him’ as the more people who log onto the site, the quicker the victim will die. With gruesome torture ideas ranging from a man sitting in water which is being topped up with hydrochloric acid with each viewer that logs on, to a man set in cement and forced to kneel in front of high wattage light bulbs which get brighter with more visitors burning his skin horrifically.

The main FBI agent Jennifer Marsh and her colleagues seem to do a really poor job of tracking down the killer, which results in a fairly long, drawn out plotline with the first two or so victims having absolutely no chance of survival. I found Marsh herself to be fairly un-likeable; she’s not a great mother and puts her job before her daughter at every given opportunity. The scene in which she’s taking a shower, and blatantly ignoring her daughter really did annoy me. As a mother myself I found her to be irritating and selfish, constantly palming her daughter off on her mum and endangering the family. There’s no doubt she’s good at her job to an extent, but the bridge scene at the end just ruined any credibility she may have had with me (Getting back in the car? Seriously, why would you do that?)

All in all I found the plotline of the film to be seriously lacking in any kind of believability and with such un-likeable characters it really does a poor job of making you care about what happens to the victims or the FBI squad. Seemingly drawing inspiration from the likes of Saw and Hostel it tries to be like those films but lacks the punch and originality that made those movies so exciting in the first place. The torture scenes feel almost like they’ve been done before and the predictable nature of the whole movie just niggled at me throughout. Had this film been made before Hostel and Saw etc then maybe it would have had slightly more of an impact, but in my opinion it’s nowhere near on the same level. Worth a watch if you wait to rent it on DVD but don’t expect to see something new and edgy as this movie will definitely disappoint!

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