Untraceable – 2008

**½/ Out of ****

The torture porn genre is by far my lease favourite fad ever to wrap its grisly fingers around the movie industry. Even with the spoof craze giving these gruesome rejects a run for their money, at least even a lame spoof doesn’t leaving you feeling nauseous. With Gregory Hoblit’s Untraceable, it is not as bad as movies such as Hostel and Wolf Creek, but it also does not know what it wants to be.

This slurry of blended personalities does not serve well; unaware if it wants to be a criticism of societies disturbing lust for tragic violence or just another film of the ever expanding genre. Hoblit, who directed the far superior Fracture last year, even carries the hypocritical message over to the motives of the villain, who in Untraceable, captures victims, and ensnaring them in malicious contraptions allows them to perish at a rate of speed linked to the number of viewers who log on to view the act. The killer, who originally targets victims due to their ties to somehow spurring the phenomena of societal violence, switches mid-film to targeting innocent peoples, and whose tortures exist merely to evoke emotion form us.

The film does however have redeeming factors, with the solid performances, more then satisfactory dialogue and gritty, but crisp camera work. Diane Lane stars as Agent Jennifer Marsh, who boasts a Jodie Foster-esque charisma made famous in Silence of the Lambs and although still, not close to this level, Diane Lane gives consistently solid work in her pictures and is in good form here. Helping her capture the killer who launches KILLWITHME.com with a live shot of a kitten starving to death on a glue trap, is Billy Burke as Detective Eric Box and Agent Griffin Dowd (Collin Hanks) who become consistently involved as the sinister internet killer expands his domain out of that of felines.

The killer isn’t particularly sinister in his presence, although his actions I suppose compensate for that. His motives, as I mentioned, are initially solid and work well, but the final act is unfocused and boats a shifty moral message. Untraceable could have been great if a few things had been altered. Firstly, if the executions, which feature flavours such as induced haemophilia and acid dissolution, were toned down in their visual clarity, as in if the tortures were implied rather then boldly promoted, the essence of the film would have shifted to relying on performances and mood, rather then shock value. Secondly, if the last act, if in addition to keeping its morals from becoming jumbled had kept with the mood of the former sections, Untraceable would have continued to challenge our minds but opts for a run-of-the-mills, slightly tedious ending with scattered reasoning and chooses to challenge our gag reflex instead. Being (I think at least) fairly obvious issues with this picture, it a shame that Hoblit opted to conduct the picture as he did.

We are left with either a half hearted torture porn film, or a hypocritical lambasting of the latter and both cannot coexist successfully in the same film, which is a shame considering that Hoblit obviously had something to say. But it is clear that he doesn’t have faith in the strength of the message he is putting forth, as if he is making an anti-violence statement he should trust in the public to support a film that is relatively non violent as well. Presumably, Hoblit instead believed that such a film must be ultra-violent to be heard at all, and the result is what I have said before, a compromised vision.

This is a disappointment, considering the solid performances and the unsettling ambient environment the successfully surrounds the film. Even if you ignore the politics you are left with an unspectacular police procedural that will be traceable only to the shelves of your local video store.

© 2008 Simon Brookfield