Untraceable
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Movie Reviews of Untraceable
Movie Review: Reveals Workings of Computer Forensics Unit
Summary: 3 Stars
Some rather grisly, elaborate murders are shown being committed on-line in this movie. People's deaths are rigged to progress according to how many people log on to view the carnage. Part of the killer's motive is to hold a mirror up to humankind - to show how base our curiosity can be - how our voyeuristic, prurient interest in other's suffering can have real consequences.
One suspects that this movie itself might be an example of pandering to our morbid fascinations - its storyline just an excuse to show torture. Nevertheless, there are elements in this movie that lift it above mere exploitation.
The producers/directors of "Untraceable" researched the largely secret operations of the FBI's Cyber Crimes Division, a unit charged with tracking on-line predators and other criminals. The Director Commentary on this DVD is especially interesting for its discussions of how the cast and crew worked to make the movie as authentic as possible and to recreate the atmosphere of the Unit's tracking rooms. They even lucked out when they decided to film in Portland, then found that City was actually headquarters for this Crimes Division. So the filmmakers had easy access to the FBI officers as consultants for the movie.
As a result, a lot of insider computer lingo gets tossed around in the early part of the movie. Diane Lane's character rattles off references to proxy servers, spoof phone cards, ISP hand-offs and blockers. I wished they would have slowed down a little and found a way to explain some of these methods that cyber criminals have of dodging attempts at tracking them. That would have made the movie truly educational and would have supplied further justification for watching the more gruesome parts of the film.
The writing and acting here are generally fairly good - with a few glaring exceptions. After witnessing one of her co-workers die a painful death on-line, the script has Lane mutter with profound understatement, "I'm not good at losing people."
However, Lane is well-cast as an official in the Division. She was the ideal actor to play a woman now casually accepted in a position of authority, without having to be a gussied, beholden sex object in the process. It would have been nice if the older generation had been granted similar status.
That was not to be though. The woman who plays Lane's mother in the film is reduced to the role of silent baby-sitter/servant in the household. Given only a couple of lines to speak and a ludicrous Groucho Marx get-up of thick eyeglasses and bushy pageboy haircut - this older woman comes off almost as someone who is so embarrassing by virtue of her over-50 age, she has to present herself in disguise. Well, if younger women such as Lane can now be cast as realistically functioning law enforcement officers, perhaps older women will also be liberated into realistic on-screen positions of authority one day soon.
These quibbles aside though, the movie is somewhat worthwhile. It opens up a window onto the little understood world of cyber crime and the people who are on the job, daily trying to stanch its deadening, deadly tide.
Movie Review: Uneven Thriller
Summary: 3 Stars
Untraceable is a thriller that is heavily influenced, for both good and bad, by the Saw film series. As in Saw, the killer uses ingenious and diabolical traps to kill his victims. The victims actually are given a chance to survive although remote. The twist here is that the killer is broadcasting his murders on the internet over a site called killwithme.com. The more visitors that log onto the site, the faster the person is killed. As an example, one victim is surrounded by dozens of heat lamps. As the site traffic increases, more heat lamps are turned on, eventually baking the unfortunate man alive.
On his trail is FBI agent Jennifer Marsh (Lane), a member of the cyber crimes unit. Her days are normally spent tracking down online predators, scam artists, and identity thieves but this is something she's never encountered before. This killer may be psychotic but he's also brilliant. Every attempt to track him down results in a bogus IP address being tossed out. Jennifer is joined in the hunt by Portland, Oregon detective Eric Box (Burke). Both of them can only watch helplessly as the killer flaunts his murders to law enforcement as millions of people visit the site. The cat and mouse game soon turns deadly as the killer sets his sights on the agents who are tracking him down including Jennifer and her family.
Diane Lane was perfect in her role. As an older actress she is still very attractive yet she's not a starlet type who would not be convincing as an FBI agent. She's strong but vulnerable. She's clever but the smartest person in the room. Most of the other performances were ordinary but Lane truly stood out. I was happy the writers did not take the sappy avenue and develop an emotional relationship between Marsh and Detective Box. This is usually an unneeded plot contrivance and thankfully it was avoided in Untraceable.
The film does suffer from one of the same weaknesses of the Saw films in that the killer is too smart and too resourceful. I always wondered how Jigsaw had the money to build all of those elaborate traps and obtain all of those empty buildings so he could kill in seclusion. I'm not a computer expert but I found the killers ability to avoid detection, particularly by the FBI, and then infiltrate the home PC of Marsh, to border on the highly implausible. As smart as the killer was he ended up making the dumb mistake of changing his modus operandi by going after the FBI agents. It simply doesn't fit with the motives of the other murders.
Untraceable is a good thriller that could have been exceptional with a bit of tinkering. It pushes the notion of how much our society has degraded as the site visitors KNOW they are helping to hasten the person's death and yet they keep coming back even after repeated warnings. The killer ends up stepping on his own feet and gets caught without any actual effort by the FBI. It's definitely worth a view for Lane's strong performance.
Movie Review: "Untraceable" as we are Disconnected
Summary: 3 Stars
As I write this review, you should know that I have deliberately avoided reading any commentary about "Untraceable," other than its synopsis. I say this because I am personally acquainted with one of the film's co-authors, and wanted my impressions to be as unfiltered and forthright as possible.
So here goes:
Given the times in which we live, the fact that this film ever saw the light of day is a far bigger story than the script itself. At its core are a group of loosely-connected, dialogue-deprived characters who do little more than facilitate the film's over-riding objective: To showcase a series of horrific and nauseating executions unwittingly facilitated by viewers of the perpetrator's internet website, KILLWITHME.COM.
At its core, this film is a reflection of our society's obsession with spectacle violence, compliments of internet-generated, streaming media delivered to anyone with access to a computer...anywhere in the world. In a grander sense, "Untraceable" is a portrait of modern life, a place reduced to two-dimensions, with violence serving as a conduit for connecting; feeling something...anything.
The dialogue is relevant only in a "card-board" context of moving the plot; not creating real people with real lives and real motivation beyond their immediate jobs and circumstances. As a result, their relationships are tenuous, disconnected and just as dimensionless as the audience's unwitting collusion in cold-blooded murder.
I was sickened by the casual nature of the killings, given the lack of sufficient motivation, intent, reason - and from an audience perspective - empathy with the characters and their circumstances; including the live footage of the killer's father [another person we don't know, and don't care about] having his head blown off and then falling off of the Brooklyn Bridge onto a car below.
If the point of the film was to make a statement about alienation, vis-à-vis the ubiquitous internet, it largely succeeded. And if for just a moment it makes us stop and think about how deadened and immune we are becoming to violence, and how violence itself is, ironically, is the way we reconnect with what it means to be human, then spend the money and put yourself through it. Personally, I think the film would be better suited to a college social studies class in just how sociopathic we have become.
The film was written by Robert Fyvolent and Mark Brinker. Diane Lane stars as FBI agent Jennifer Marsh.
None of the rest really matters...kind of like life these days.
[postscript] I could give this film 5 stars for relevance, but I happen to love intense character development, because I still like to connect with other human beings; and prefer films that do the same.
Movie Review: Wait a minute...what are you trying to say....are you blaming us for loving violence!?1?
Summary: 3 Stars
Untraceable seems like the perfect thriller. And it deals with something that not a lot of thrillers have yet dealt with and that's the idea of cyber crimes and a very disturbing cyber-crime at that. Untraceable could have been the perfect set up for a very disturbing, gory thriller with homages to Silence of The Lambs, Saw, and other thrillers. Unfortunately where the idea was great the execution was awful. I think many mistakes were made with this dud and done differently it could have been great. The unfortunate part is that director Gregory Hoblit is not lacking experience. In fact he has directed some fantastic thrillers and should have been able to make this a far more worthwhile cause. Not only that but he has years of experience of TV Cop Drama and yet fails miserably in creating any sort of character arc or real thrill to the story. Its not a complete wash I mean there are moments where you slide forward on the front of your seat as they dangle this murder in front of you and you think "All right, here we go" and then the next scene sends you slouching back into 'this is boring' mode. Its the perfect collection of the wrong elements.
One reason being Miss Diane Lane. She's a pretty good actress and I like her in a couple of films though I never been a major fan of hers and always seen her in mostly supporting roles. In here I find her boring and just with no emotion to her and that's exactly what she brings to the table. She leads the film in a boring manner without ever really getting into the case besides showing a lot of perseverance. Colin Hanks, probably the most talented on board, does show a lot of potential but they never give him enough to work with so he mostly is just there. Billy Burke is the hot detective who shows up to help out the single Lane. Burke barely is a blip on the radar other than being some sort of lame romantic contact for Lane that never really pans out.
Perhaps given a better, more dynamic script this cast could have pulled together and done something but I think they were an unfortunate ingredient because there was no chemistry no spark, except for maybe a slight connection between Hanks and Lane as partners. Now the real key to this film should have been the murders. The idea was the more people that visited a web site where someone was strung up and dying in a different way, the faster they died. This could have opened up a huge door for being diverse and interesting and they do a half decent job and the murders are grisly and disgusting but everything else around it is so tame and boring that you can easily forget about this film.
Movie Review: Unblameable
Summary: 3 Stars
In a firing squad, the victim is blindfolded and faces a line of sometimes a dozen men with guns. The men take aim and fire at the same time. A practice grew of informing the executioners that one of them had been given a blank cartridge. This prevented the possibility that the men would aim away by diffusing the subsequent guilt. Even the notion of a firing squad itself is meant to help assuage the weight of responsibility. After all, who's to say which man's bullet actually did the killing?
Populations that grow as fast as America's begin to lose that basic human value. Like any other resource, the more of us there are, the less we are worth. And the easier it is to act like the act of observing death and pain isn't the exact same as causing it. UNTRACEABLE takes the creepy, anonymous lecherousness of the internet, and both admonishes and capitalizes off of it.
Because there's a new website, you see, and if you go to it, you can watch something die. In fact, the more people who visit the website, the faster the death occurs. Don't worry. Sometimes it takes millions of visitors to kill the victim, and you're just one visitor. Just take a peek. And don't worry! The website is completely (refer to the movie title)!
It's possible the movie is arguing that things like Youtube have destroyed our last vestiges of shame. At best, it's pointing out that it's a back-handed blessing (but hey, even the depopulation caused by the Black Plague led to more competitve wages and, arguably, the Renaissance. Perhaps Youtube is just the ugly gate to a new and better world. Ha ha. I'm sorry. I'm off track.) In any case, although it might spur some interesting discussions, the movie only sustains interest when it exploits the very thing it's complaining about. Much like the dispassionate news reporters who "tsk" at tragedy and turn practiced sympathy on the viewers at home, UNTRACEABLE is mostly just distant and disingenuous.
The torture bits, of course, those have spunk and verve, to use a few poorly chosen adjectives, but the story itself doesn't have the same staying power as the topic matter. Even the presence of the lovely Diane Lane (I still can't believe she was in Judge Dredd) doesn't add much spirit to this by-the-numbers techno thriller. Watch it, if you must, for the sticky questions it might prompt, but don't expect to be engrossed anymore than you would by a grisly highway accident.