Untraceable

t's time once again to act all horrified by the extremes to which people will go - in this case, on the internet – while watching said extremes just a little too closely. It's nothing new, especially if you've endured any of the recent run of horror movies where torture is lingered over a little too lovingly, but at least Untraceable has the (limited) dignity to limit the viewers exposure to each individual horror to a few brief glimpses. Jennifer Marsh ( Diane Lane ) is an FBI Agent investigating a killer with a twist: not only does the killer put their brutal crimes up on the internet for all to see, his murder devices are actually connected up to the net so the more hits his site gets, the faster his victims die. So if people would just stop watching, the killer would go away - and if people stopped watching movies like this, we'd get the same result. Don't hold your breath. Lane gives a performance that's better than this fairly trashy film deserves, and not surprisingly there's a certain grim fascination with the internet snuff sequences: if they didn't hold at least some interest, the whole movie would collapse. But the plotting is so painfully obvious and cliched there's just not a whole lot of suspense here even when the internet killer moves into Marsh's real world to bump off some very obvious targets. Still, if "slickly competent" sounds like a compliment to you then feel free to take it as one here.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #426)