Untraceable | Diane Lane, Zachary Hoffman | The Premise was good and offered some food for thought!

Untraceable | Diane Lane, Zachary Hoffman | intriguing premise overcomes indifferent execution

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Untraceable

	Untraceable Diane Lane, Zachary Hoffman Sony Pictures, 2008 average customer review:based on 68 reviews view larger image
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Within the FBI there exists a division dedicated to investigating and prosecuting criminals on the internet. Welcome to the front lines of the war on cybercrime where special Agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) and Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) have seen it all?until now. A tech-savvy internet predator is displaying his graphic murders on his own website and the fate of each of his tormented captives is left in the hands of the public: the more hits his site gets the faster his victims die. When this game of cat and mouse becomes personal Marsh and her team must race against the clock to track down this technical mastermind who is virtually untraceable.System Requirements:Running Time: 101 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER Rating: R UPC: 043396191341 Manufacturer No: 19134

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The Premise was good and offered some food for thought!

"Untraceable" is about Special Agent Jennifer Marsh, who is assigned to the Cybercrime Task Force Unit of the FBI. While monitoring hackers and other cyber crimes, she stumbles across a website that invites people to "killwithme". Therefore as the death count rises, so does the boldness of his actions and the motive for his senseless killings. What I found interesting about the movie was the entire premise of "if given a chance, would you watch, even if it meant someone would die, events unfolding on-line"? Would knowing that your mere actions would result in someone's death, stop you from watching or prevent you from clicking "enter" with your mouse? Maybe I analyzed it all too much, but based on what I know of our society and its need to know and my belief that most people are voyeurs, I think that people would tune in. Think about it, we live in a world of technology (blackberries, palms and PDAs) and reality television. How many people dial up to watch the ridiculous or simply watch things that they know are private? How many people dial up to watch Big Brother After Hours? Afterall, we live in a society where we want to view sex and or violence, even if on some level we know it isn't right, but we are curious. So hopefully that kind of explains why I gave this movie "3*s" because underneath it all, I think it offered food for thought.

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intriguing premise overcomes indifferent execution

Writers Robert Fyvolent, Mark Brinker and Allison Burnett, along with director Gregory Hoblit ("Fracture"), have come up with a humdinger of a premise for their dark thriller "Untraceable." It seems that a techno-savvy serial killer has set up a website where people can go to watch him torture and murder his victims in real time. The kicker is that the degree and speed of the torture are in direct proportion to the number of viewers logged onto the site, thus making the general public morally complicit in the crimes. The always superb Diane Lane really classes up the joint playing a cyber-cop who is not only hot on the trail of the killer, but might actually be one of his intended targets as well.

The idea for "Untraceable" is probably better than the movie itself, yet, despite its weaknesses, this is a reasonably engrossing and gripping thriller, provided one can stomach the sleaziness of the material and the too-clever-by-half "ironic" ending (the movie is at least more believable in its approach than the similarly-themed "The Condemned"). "Untraceable" certainly has some depressing things to say about our natural human propensity for sadism and voyeurism, and it raises the terrifying prospect that we will now be able to use modern technology as a means of satisfying our bloodlust with total impunity. The movie might have had a sharper moral and ethical edge to it had it featured some common-folk characters debating within and amongst themselves whether or not to log onto the site, knowing that, by doing so, they would be contributing to the death of a fellow human being. But because the writers fail to incorporate such scenes into the screenplay, the premise never gets much beyond the "intriguing idea" stage. Still, the concept is compelling enough on its own to keep "Untraceable" a few steps ahead of the psycho-thriller pack.

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