Review of “Untraceable”
The internet – as we all know – has changed our lives, and increasingly it has become an interactive, collaborative experience. It’s possible to create art and music with others, perform scientific experiments, or live an entirely other life. But there’s always been a darker, exploitative side to the cyber-world, and it’s this that Untraceable explores, asking a curly ethical question: if by logging onto a website you contribute to a murder, are you merely curious or an accomplice?
Diane Lane plays FBI agent Jennifer Marsh, a cyber-crime specialist who can think outside the set-top box. Based in cold, rainy Oregon, she works the night shift tracking criminals all over the USA using a combination of her high-tech skills and her intuition. When the key-tapping and mouse-clicking is done for the night, she returns home where she lives with her mother and daughter. Getting close and dirty to the pointy end of criminal activity is not usually part of her job until a series of local kidnappings end up on a grisly website called “Killwithme.com”. The person behind the website constructs devious ways to torture and kill live on the web, and the victim’s fate depends upon web-site visits. The more viewers, the faster the death. After witnessing the first of these, Marsh gets to team up with Detective Eric Box (Billie Burke) and try and find the killer. Inevitably she gets more involved than she should.
It’s a tightly constructed thriller in the mould of Se7en or Silence of The Lambs, although without the same depth of psychological characterization. Jennifer Marsh is too low down the police hierarchy to bear much weight of responsibility, and her net-nemesis turns out to be no brooding Hannibal Lecter. It’s a plot-driven thriller and characters (and in some cases logic) take a back seat to the central force of the narrative. For those concerned about gore, it is not as gruesome as the Saw movies, although torture is never pretty to watch. Director Gregory Hoblit (who has made similar films like Fracture and Frequency) carefully limits the moralising of the role of the internet to asides and keeps building the tension with a faultless production design. It’s a highly polished film that raises some yet to be answered questions about the ethics of watching in a camera obsessed society.
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