Review: UNTRACEABLE—Please, God, Let It Be True

Let’s focus on Ms. Lane for a moment, since she’s the best thing about the movie. She plays Jennifer Marsh, an agent in the FBI’s Cyber Crime Unit in Portland, Oregon. She’s an ace worker on the night shift, nimbly working with fellow computer expert Griffin (Colin Hanks) to track down thieves, fraudsters and predators. Then she goes home to kiss her young daughter good morning, send her off to school, and exchange meaningful looks with her own mother (the underused Mary Beth Hurt) before tumbling into bed.

Jennifer looks perpetually rumpled, though I can’t recall anything specific about her wardrobe. Perhaps “worried and exhausted” is a better description than rumpled; we get only a few hints about her life previous to the beginning of the story, but Lane is able to convey volumes with a downward glance of her eyes, even when she’s asked to do some ridiculous things.

Jennifer and Griffin are first alerted to the serial killer when a tipsters sends along the web site (http://www.killwithme.com) and they see a kitten slowly die. The first human victim ratchets up the attention level of the FBI as well as local law enforcement, in the person of Detective Eric Box (Billy Burke), and as succeeding victims are executed, the web site begins to experience killer traffic—sorry, couldn’t resist the cheap joke at the expense of human life.

There’s no mystery, though, because there’s no investigation! To be more accurate, we don’t see Detective Box doing any footwork; we hear him summarize his findings to Jennifer. Nor do we see Jennifer and Griffin clicking away on their keyboards tracking down the web site; we hear them summarzie their findings to their boss (in short, the killer must be a computer genius, because the agents determine that it’s simply impossible to trace). Throughout the movie, we rarely see the agents doing any police work; we just watch them sit around agonizing about not being able to do anything to stop the guy.

Because each “death” sequence is set up in the same way, shot in the same way, and edited the same way, suspense never builds. We don’t wonder if the killer will succeed; we already know he’ll succeed, until the very end, of course, when good must prevail against evil.

When the identity of the killer is revealed, once again we don’t get to experience Jennifer figuring things out or putting together different pieces of the puzzle; instead, she takes one tiny clue and unravels the whole complicated case, narrating the whole darn thing to a roomful of agents, illustrated by clips of all the action we never got to see. How boring.

And the killer himself, as played by Joseph Cross, is completely unbelievable. We can (maybe) accept that he’s some kind of computer whiz kid, but to imagine that he’s also capable of dreaming up the elaborate death traps, much less carry out the murders with a motive that still leaves me scratching my head ... no, forget it, not happening.

I won’t mention how the screenwriters resorted to one of the oldest tricks in the book in order to engineer a finale that’s entirely predictable.

My suggestion: let’s call for a moratorium on movies commenting on the evils of the Internet. We do enough of that on the Internet itself, thank you very much.