Untraceable: Unwatchable

Untraceable (2008) • View trailer
No stars (turkey). Rating: R, for profanity and excruciating, exploitative violence and torture
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.31.08

The trouble with culturing a disease is that the little buggers inevitably escape the petri dish.

Horror films are designed to be outrageous; they cater to a specific viewership that worships at the alter of torture-porn slime such as the Hostel and Saw series.

FBI cybercrime special agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane, center) and Portland
police detective Eric Box (Billy Burke, far right) watch in horror, along with
the rest of Marsh's colleagues, as another poor victim is tortured to death on a
Web site run by a tech-savvy Internet predator.

Indeed, it could be argued that horror films — like any other aspect of youth culture — aren't doing their job unless they offend and otherwise dismay mainstream society.

It's an entirely different matter, however, when such reprehensible garbage oozes from the fringe element and emerges with a deceptive outer layer of respectable clothing, designed specifically to entice the unwary.

In the case of Untraceable, the respectable clothing is worn by star Diane Lane, a veteran actress with a long list of credits stretching back to The Outsiders and The Cotton Club, who more recently copped an Oscar nomination for Unfaithful and indulged her romantic side in Under the Tuscan Sun.

Her presence here adds bogus legitimacy to an otherwise worthless piece of trash from a director — Gregory Hoblit — determined to rub our noses in precisely the sort of ghastly, grisly mayhem that has become de rigueur in horror flicks such as those cited above.

To call Untraceable tasteless is the worst of understatements.

Mainstream cop thrillers should be able to survive on tension and character development, and in fairness scripter Robert Fyvolent tries to get some juice going between FBI cybercrime special agent Jennifer Marsh (Lane) and police detective Eric Box (Billy Burke, wholly unmemorable). But Lane and Burke have zero chemistry ... or maybe it's just that Hoblit couldn't be bothered to encourage them to create any.

The story is a sadistic blend of cyber wizardry and old-fashioned mechanical torture. A deranged wing nut — Joseph Cross, as Owen Reilly — sets up a Web site with streaming video of an escalating series of murders-in-progress.

He starts with a kitten but quickly escalates to people, and the gimmick is that the various death traps are controlled by the number of viewers who log into the site: The more lookie-loos, the faster the victim dies.