Untraceable - Review

Director: Gregory Hoblit
Writers: Burnett/Fyvolent/Brinker
Starring: Diane Lane
Runtime: 1 hr 40 minutes

The last time I saw Diane Lane is a really good picture, it was Unfaithful. It was a movie about Lane's character cheating on her husband, played by Richard Gere. If anyone in the audience was having an affair behind their spouse's back, I can guarantee that Unfaithful sent shivers up their spine. It was a well done movie.

Untraceable is not, but that's no surprise. This is the time of year when Hollywood puts out the movies it wants to sweep under the rug. A release in February is too late for the Oscars, and too early for the summer crowd. By the time next year's Oscars come around, anything released in mid-winter will be long forgotten. January and February are the doldrums for movies.

Untraceable is a thriller that doesn't thrill. It takes a very good, very sexy Diane Lane and casts her in the most boring possible role. When you think of crime movies about serial killers, you would naturally suppose that the hero is a slick FBI agent, a tough cop, or a hot CSI chick on the prowl.

Diane Lane could play any of those if she wanted to, but here she's cast as an internet detective.

A what?

That's right. Lane plays Jennifer Marsh, an FBI agent that sits on her butt and tracks down internet criminals. Sitting next to her is Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks). He's another internet detective. Together, the two of them talk about IP addresses, internet servers, and a lot of other geek mumbo jumbo. As Marsh's boss says in one scene, "I didn't understand a word you just said."

Tell me about it.

All right, that's a lie, I did understand most of what Marsh said. But who cares? When our hero has her ass plastered to a chair for the first twenty minutes of a film, I couldn't care less what she's talking about. I want her to do something.

Eventually, the film takes shape. There's a psycho on the internet. He kidnaps people and rigs them up to strange torture devices and puts their demise on a webpage. The kicker: the more people that log on to watch the victim die, the faster he'll kick the bucket. Of course there's no way to stop this, so we get to watch these people die in graphic detail, without once thinking that any of them are going to survive. There is virtually no suspense in these scenes, and they go as follows: man begins dying in sulphuric acid, Diane Lane looks horrified, man dies even faster, Diane looks more horrified, man boils and bubbles, Diane steps out for air, man dies, Diane looks upset.

It is up to Lane to catch the killer, but that's going to be difficult because the killer's a genius. As with every computer guy in the movies, he's three steps ahead of the cops, and can come and go on the wings of angels. If you're guessing that the only way this guy will be caught is if he is stupid enough to go after Diane Lane, you'd be pretty much on the money.

The movie is fairly derivative. Marsh throws a birthday party for her kid, but alas, her beeper interrupts the bash. Marsh has a daughter and mom living at home, but after the killer gets too close, she sends them away, never to be seen again (in the movies, everyone has an aunt living in the next state, where kids and grandmas can stay until the shooting stops). Marsh has a small quasi-love thing with a Portland detective, but it never comes to sex because he's a nice guy.

The movie feels like a cross between "pick a thriller" and Saw. The torture sequences are there to be what they are: torture sequences. Watching these people die feels silly, because you find yourself asking, "Let me get this straight. The guy's a mechanic, a chemist, a computer scientist, and an electrician all rolled into one? Guy should be at MIT."

I want Diane Lane to go back to dramas and play movies with meat. She is going to reach that age where Hollywood wants to send her off to TV land, and I don't want her to go. She's too damn good for this kind of movie, and I hope she knows it.

Photos: Yahoo Movies

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