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Untraceable is the sort of psychological thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat, mostly so you can bolt the hell out of the theatre as soon as it ends.
This serial killer mystery has a good cast and a reasonable story and it could have been solid, but the plot thickens via acts of such abject stupidity that the movie is eventually ruined.
Diane Lane stars in Untraceable as an FBI agent whose specialty is Internet crime.
She sits at a computer all day and tracks down crooks, identity thieves, pedophiles and anyone else who uses the web for nefarious purposes. Imagine her touch typing skills.
One day she's tipped to a site where a cat has been cruelly killed; the death was streamed live to thousands of viewers. Lane's character knows at once that the person responsible isn't going to stop with a kitten, and sure enough, the next victim at this live execution site -- killwithme.com -- is a man.
His method of dying is tied to the number of people who enter the website. As more and more of the curious and ghoulish log on to watch him suffer, the faster and more horribly the man dies.
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Later, his body is dumped at the house of a politician seemingly unrelated to the crime, but Lane and her FBI work buddy (Colin Hanks) know that nothing this killer does is by chance or coincidence. And they can't shut him down, because his site is untraceable.
But why is he killing people at all? And why kill them in such a public fashion? And are the victims all connected? As bodies continue falling in various gruesome ways, Lane realizes that the killer has hacked into her computer and has access to all her files.
Now, it's personal. (This menace has been telegraphed all along by the way her house and her child are photographed -- as if they were under observation. And they were.)
Now she has to capture the killer before he captures her. Based on everything the filmmakers have shown us about these two characters, it should be no contest. Lane is self-sufficient, brave, capable, intuitive and -- whoa! look at that! -- she's also stupid!
Who knew.
Just in case you thought all the grisly killings and violence were gratuitous, Untraceable has a strict moral lesson to deliver about the pitfalls of the Internet: Loss of privacy or identity, intellectual property theft, financial swindles of one sort or another, uncensored websites that cater to the basest of tastes, a world of like-minded sickos at your sicko fingertips. (And how about those plagiarized college essays!) Untraceable says that the people who log on to watch the horrible murders are accomplices to the crime, both philosophically and actually.
So what does that make the movie audience that turns up to watch Untraceable?
Accessories?
Idiots, maybe?
(This film is rated 18-A)