The latest cookie cutter thriller from the Hollywood machine, Untraceable opens with an adorable kitten stepping up to a bowl of milk, only to find its cute, fuzzy paws suddenly glued to a panel on the floor. A shadowy figure enters the room, aims a stage light directly into the sad feline’s eyes and sets up a video camera to film the poor thing for the internet. Disturbing? Definitely. Does it get more upsetting when the killer graduates to a human subject? A little. When he moves on to using people we’ve come to know personally in the film? Barely. And therein lies the problem with Untraceable - an originally unsettling concept grows tiresome and numbing quickly as the film turns predictable and fails to give us anything worth caring or thinking about.

Untraceable centers around FBI agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane), a talented operative, specializing in Internet crime. Her job routinely entails the identification and termination of nefarious websites. Agent Marsh meets her match when she's tipped off to KillWithMe.com, a website that streams live footage of various murders and the victims as they slowly and torturously meet their demise. The catch here is that as more viewers tune in to watch, a complicated computer program speeds up the rate at which the victims die. As a plot device, the idea certainly has some fright potential... just enough, maybe, for a 42-minute episode of Law & Order: SVU. As a 100-minute film, it’s painfully obvious that more thought needed to be invested in Untraceable, beyond that initial concept.

As always, Diane Lane does a nice job in bringing some life to lackluster material (as she did in Under the Tuscan Sun and Unfaithful). Despite another good performance by Lane, one of several flaws in Untraceable is that we feel no concern for the well-being of anyone else in the film. Colin Hanks, as Lane’s partner, does his best to be a likable guy, but his flimsy, water-cooler dialogue doesn’t help to lift the project to a level of where it needs to be. He's more scenery than character. Early on in the movie, when we meet Jennifer’s daughter, Annie (Perla Haney-Jardine), it couldn’t be clearer that she’ll eventually come into perilous contact with the villain. She's the inevitable emotional bait for the audience. It's blatant manipulation, but it's ineffective because the age-old thriller gimmick, in which the evildoer eventually decides to make it "personal" and brings danger right to the protagonist’s doorstep, has been trotted out one too many times to work on modern audiences.

Just as big a problem with Untraceable boils down to mere believability. It's hard to accept that, through a series of internationally mirrored IP addresses, a website streaming live video to millions of people could somehow hide its point of origin from the FBI. Yet it’s the plausibility of this fact that’s crucial to keeping the good guys constantly at arm’s length from the bad guy. When it comes time for our heroes to try and explain this to their boss, the resultant techno-babble is hilariously impossible to follow. It’s one of the silliest points in a thoroughly weak script that induced audible laughter from members of my audience.

The accelerating violence and moral decay of modern society has long been a favorite subject of Hollywood’s (The Most Dangerous Game, The Lottery and A Clockwork Orange being some of the most notable examples). And more recently, a few films have capitalized on the popularity of game shows and reality television to suggest that the public’s active participation in that violence is consistently on the rise as well. Recent films such as Series 7: The Contenders and The Condemned took a concept that was once thought-provoking and began to drive it into the ground, turning it into a cliche. Here’s to hoping that Untraceable is the final nail in that coffin.