Your arms and legs are restrained. You struggle against the gag in your mouth. Blood runs down your torso; superficial cuts on your chest spell out a message – “KILL WITH ME”. You struggle again, and bury your screams in the gag.

A while later, you bleed to death.

Untraceable is about a serial killer who transmits his killings “live” on the internet… except he doesn’t really kill his victims. Instead, his victim begins to die when people start visiting the website; the more people who visit killwithme.com, the faster, and the more violently, his victim dies.

In the example above, a helicopter pilot bled to death from the seemingly insignificant cuts on his chest, as a result of intravenous administration of an anticoagulant; the more people visited the website, the more anticoagulant is fed into his veins. If no one visited the site, no anticoagulant would have prevented his blood from clotting, and his wounds would have healed normally.

The solution seems ridiculously easy. One could simply shut down the website, putting an end to the killer’s agenda. However, FBI Special Agent Jennifer Marsh finds out very soon that things were not so simple.

The murderer operates the website using a “botnet”, which is a coalescence of hacked computers that are remotely controlled, changing the IP address of the domain name (www.killwithme.com) every few minutes. By the time Marsh shuts down the computer the FBI had traced back to, the site’s content would have moved to another hacked computer within the botnet. To make matters worse, the servers are located outside the FBI’s jurisdiction.

Plot: Wasted & Hypocritical

The webmaster’s modus operandi is straightforward, yet exposes a voyeuristic desire – of taking schadenfreude delight in watching others die – in people. By extension, Untraceable stands on a sanctimonious pulpit, preaching perspicuous sermons of “You should be ashamed of yourselves for taking secret pleasure in watching people die.” Paradoxically, with its extended scenes of gore and torture, it exudes as much hypocrisy as the people who left comments on the website’s shout box, asking people not to log on the website.

Truth be told, Untraceable has great potential to be a chilling psychological thriller that explores different dimensions of thought, keeping the audience in great suspense and driving them crazy, by focusing more on the protagonists’ emotions and mental struggles.

Instead, director Gregory Hoblit reduced this film to mere torture porn, a film genre that this UrbanWire writer associates with films that have little plot and only sell because of their shockingly gory content. He also finds it very puzzling that the killer was revealed so early in the film, startlingly breaking the suspense, instead of holding the audience hostage in a realm of anxiety.

Characters and their Actors

It didn’t help that protagonist Jennifer Marsh is forced into a stereotypical heroine role – the brave police officer and the single mother. Have you ever wondered if there’s something about being a widowed/divorced mother that inspires heroism?

More stereotypes are thrown at you with the introduction of detective Eric Box, played by Billy Burke, the strong and reliable man that the female heroine is supposed to go running to in times of vulnerability. He is, however, always one step behind Marsh, so that our female heroine can get all the limelight for being the braver, brainier one.

Hence, it’s a pleasant surprise that such a staid typecast didn’t stifle the talent of Diana Lane, who played Marsh. She conveyed the steely professionalism of Jennifer Marsh the Special Agent, and the vulnerabilities of Jennifer Marsh the Human.

You will find it difficult not feel for her as you watch poignant scenes of Jennifer Marsh the Human losing friend and colleague Griffin Dowd to a boiling vat of sulphuric acid. Later, Jennifer Marsh the Special Agent divorces her emotions, so as to objectively handle the situation, by referring Dowd with dispassionate terms as such “the subject”.

Her acting is rivalled only by Joseph Cross, who played her onscreen online nemesis. However, unlike Lane’s, his role gave him very little opportunity to showcase his talent. If you have a psychopathic genius in your hands, don’t you think it would be far more intriguing if he were depicted a la Hannibal Lecter, instead of a berserk mental case, albeit cold and calculating?

It is obvious that the young actor, who also played Augusten Burroughs, the very complex lead character in Running With Scissors , can definitely offer so much more than what was demanded of the online predator in Untraceable.

Nevertheless, Cross, as much as he was allowed to, moulded a personality of abrupt violence and fervent obsession, that the audience can’t help but hate, and later sympathise, when the reasons behind his actions were revealed.

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The meticulous attention paid to the technical details of Untraceable is commendable. This could be ascribed to the special care director Hoblit took to incorporate verisimilitude in the film, bringing in the police and the FBI. Former FBI special agent Ernest Hilbert, now director of MySpace security, was one person who rendered help during the production of this film.

When Marsh used 3 computers to track a credit-card thief in the first scene, Hilbert insisted that it was not for dramatic effect. He told MTV Movie News, “You can’t get on the Internet from your desktop computer. There’s a reason for that. If your computer is on the Internet, it can be hacked. So the FBI network is completely separate. Then you’d have an Internet undercover computer that runs on a blank IP that doesn’t come back to the FBI. You can make copies from there.”

He also helped make sure that the film accurately represented a website that can’t be traced or shut down in reality.

But won’t it pose a threat by instigating copycats to do the same in reality, you ask? “There have been a number of sites I’ve gone after, where people have done a similar thing,” Hilbert told MTV Movie News. “These would all be things that the FBI would eventually figure out and track back. [It would] probably take upwards of a couple months, locking it down to each particular thing.”

He also said that he finds it interesting how the smartest criminals seem to have a fundamental misconception of how the internet works. “Computers are not like telephones. It’s just that simple, that’s what people think. The novelty of computers is gone. But as much as you try to hide it, it’s a machine. It’s gonna come back to whoever was really behind it. We can catch you,” he warned.

One wonders if it is as easy to catch online criminals as shown in the film. “It is fairly boring to watch all the steps that it really would take,” Hilbert added in the same interview. “You really want to see what that looks like? Join the FBI.”

Verdict

Untraceable has little plot and stifling role stereotypes. It does place you on the edge of your seat, especially during the final scenes, but don’t expect to leave the cinema with an afterglow of an adrenaline rush. After all, a thriller that reeks of brainless violence and gore, instead of cruel intelligence, tends to leave its audience feeling equally vapid.

Watch this film only if you want to rent the DVD from the nearby video store for a fluffy stay-over movie marathon. Otherwise, this UrbanWire writer sees no logic in paying for a film that insults you, with its blatant hypocrisy and complete lack of intelligence.

UrbanWire gives Untraceable 2 out of 5 stars.

Movie Details

Opens: Mar 27

Movie Rating: NC-16

Running Time: 101mins

Language: English

Director: Gregory Hoblit

Cast: Diane Lane, Dan Callahan, Colin Hanks, Bill & Joseph Cross