STUDIO: Sony
RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2008
STARRING: Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks, Joseph Cross, and Mary Beth Hurt
WRITTEN BY: Robert Fyvolent & Mark R. Brinker and Allison Burnett
DIRECTED BY: Gregory Hoblit
FEATURES: Audio Commentary
4 Featurettes

Do you honestly believe that if any website started to post live murders that required a high hit count for the victim to succumb and die that those site's numbers would go through the roof? There's no way. We may be sick, but we're not THAT sick. At least not yet. Before the first murder, some people might check it out assuming it was a hoax or some complex David Blaine trick, but once that it was confirmed to be real and proved that your surfing made you complicit in the horrendous death of an innocent man, I simply don't believe that a large number of people would click. Most people wouldn't even turn their computers on. Maybe I have too much faith in my fellow man, but most people I know would never want to even see a snuff film, much less passively participate in one. Sadly, that's the false premise of Untraceable, a film that works reasonably well if you can past the huge gaps in the basic set-up (and a few other eye-raising plot twists), but simply falls prey to the fact that it's been done before better, even just on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit every week. Unlike some thrillers released even this year, Untraceable is never so awful that it's offensive, it just never quite justifies its existence, unless your threshold for the genre is pretty low.

Diane Lane stars in Untraceable as Special Agent Jennifer Marsh, an FBI agent who specializes in cybercrimes with buddy Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks), who might as well be wearing a sign that says "Victim or Killer?" because in movies like these, he's either the bad guy or he's not making it to the final reel. Anyone who's ever seen a movie before can tell you that. The Hannibal Lecter to Lane's Clarice Starling is a killer who sets up elaborate traps on a website called KillWithMe.com. The trick is that this killer's contraptions are fueled by the hit count to the website. For example, one victim is cut and then tied to IVs of Heparin, a drug that thins the blood. The more people watch, the more his wounds bleed, until he eventually has no more blood to give. In another, a victim is in a tank of water that becomes more sulfuric acid than H20 as the hit count tops 25 million in a matter minutes. Yeah, I don't believe that would happen either but we already covered that ground.

Director Gregory Hoblit shoots Untraceable with enough style to keep it from falling into the trap of the modern thriller - it's never as deadly dull as most of its peers, even if you can't help but feel it's been done before. But there are a lot of people out there who tune into all of the Law & Orders every week just looking for a good thriller and Untraceable should have a much longer life on DVD than it did in theaters. The well-made DVD from Sony helps. The picture is very crisp and clear and the sound is problem-free. Viewers will also find an audio commentary and four informative behind-the-scenes featurettes. Suspend your disbelief on a Saturday night and you could do a lot worse than Untraceable. The rest of the week might be a different story.