Movie Review : Untraceable

It’s taking the easy way out to say Untraceable’s simply a ‘cyber’ version of a Saw film, but there are enough similarities between this crime story and the Saw franchise to make it a fair comparison. What this dramatic thriller has going for it that’s not necessarily found in a Saw movie are solid performances from its leading actors, Diane Lane, Colin Hanks and Billy Burke. That, along a premise that’s incredibly relevant as well as disturbingly chilling, sets this one apart from Saw and its spawns.

The Story

Do you slow down when passing a car crash? Are you one of those people who can’t help but watch replays of horrible accidents on TV and/or online? With Untraceable, the moral question posed is along those same lines. If you knew about a website with live video of a stranger being tortured and killed, would you click on the link and check out what’s going on?

Lane stars as Special Agent Jennifer Marsh, an integral part of the FBI’s newly formed cybercrimes unit located in Portland, Oregon. Marsh and her partner Griffin Dowd (Hanks) spend their nights on duty surfing the internet seeking out criminal behavior. Dealers of kiddy porn, sexual predators, and other sickos are their targets as the team attempts to keep the internet safe.

An anonymous tip leads the investigators to killwithme.com. Visiting the site, Lane and Dowd see a kitten being lured into a trap and left to die in front of a video camera streaming the feed in real time on the net. It’s extremely disturbing, but Lane’s told by her boss to focus on crimes against humans. However, the killing of the poor kitten was just a way to entice viewers to the site. From that jumping off point, the creep who created the website progresses to torturing and killing a man for millions to see. In fact, he’s counting on millions of sets of eyes watching the horrific event unfold. The more people visit his site, the faster the victim dies.



Lane, Dowd, and local cop Detective Eric Box (Burke) need to discover the killer’s physical address, but he’s as computer savvy as the FBI team trying to catch him. His site is virtually untraceable. Complicating and aggravating matters, the publicity generated by the case only serves to help increase the number of visitors to killwithme.com. Law enforcement’s only hope is to somehow find a connection between the seemingly random victims and whoever runs the site. But as they’re tracking down the psycho, he’s not only one step ahead of them but also ready and willing to make things personal for the officers involved in the investigation.

The Acting

Diane Lane does a fine job of playing a tough-as-nails FBI computer cybercrime whiz who finds it hard to balance life as a single mother with her job. Each night she surfs her way through the worst the web has to offer. Each day, she tries to leave those images behind and concentrate on just being a mom. Lane delivers a solid performance, seemingly equally at ease slinging around all the technical jargon and hosting a birthday party for her young daughter at a roller rink. Lane also shows she can convincingly handle the action parts. When push comes to shove and she’s forced into getting physical, Lane turns into a real tigress.



Colin Hanks was apparently cut out of the same ‘everyman’ mold as his famous father, Tom. Hanks provides what little comic relief there is in the film, although it’s humor that’s totally appropriate for the situations. The jokes don’t feel as though - as they often do in this dark of a film - they were inserted simply to lighten the mood.
Billy Burke takes on the romantic interest sort of role as the handsome cop who not only assists with the investigation but offers Lane some off-duty support as needed. Officer Box is a character we’ve seen over and over again, but Burke does a good job of fleshing out a role that’s written as only one-dimensional.

The Bottom Line

Cat lovers and those who found Saw or Hostel too disturbing to watch may want to stay away from Untraceable. Or, in lieu of avoiding the film altogether, be prepared to hide your eyes during any scene that takes place in a basement. If the interior is dark and a character is walking downstairs, or a video camera is shown with its red light on, that might be a good time for the squeamish to go for soda or popcorn.



For the most part Untraceable is a taut and compelling game of cat (no pun intended) and mouse with the good guys really up against the wall. The idea of visitors to a website being so intimately involved in heinous murders is quite thought-provoking and a real disturbing premise for a film. And director Gregory Hoblit definitely serves up the chills and the gore (oh yes, there’s graphic violence aplenty in this R-rated pic), but he does so without forgetting to move the human drama forward for a good three-quarters of the movie.
Unfortunately, the story stumbles and the edge-of-your-seat thriller transforms into just another clichéd cop drama during its last 30-40 minutes. Characters act stupidly and a jarring line of dialogue from the beginning of the film, one you just knew would have to come back into play, sure enough does wind up playing an important part late in the film. Untraceable gets thrown off its rails and can’t recover the momentum it had edging into the final act. It’s frustrating to watch what was a completely absorbing thriller degenerate into something so predictable. Not even Lane's solid performance can salvage a disappointing finale.

GRADE: B-

Untraceable was directed by Gregory Hoblit is rated R for some prolonged sequences of strong gruesome violence and language.

Theatrical Release Date: January 25, 2008

Diane Lane Talks About 'Untraceable'

Diane Lane stars as FBI Agent Jennifer Marsh in the dramatic thriller Untraceable. Although her character is an expert at investigating criminals on the internet, Lane admits she’d be perfectly happy living in the dark ages, back before cell phones and text messaging. Learning to speak the ‘language’ of a cybercrimes investigator was just as hard as learning a foreign language. “I’m lousy at it. I’m allowed to hang out in the room with these people,” laughed Lane. “I can’t really participate. It’s different. They are born into it. I very reluctantly started paying attention when I was 30. I just don’t have the brain cells to rub together fast enough, you know?”

Lane’s character patrols the internet in search of sexual predators and other criminal activity.

When Marsh and her partner Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) are made aware of a horribly creepy website – killwithme.com – they don’t initially take the concept seriously. That quickly changes when the site’s owner progresses from killing an animal on camera to human victims. The more users log on to his site, the faster his victims die. It’s up to Agent Marsh and her team of experts to determine the man’s physical location before more men die at the hands of this sick serial killer.
Lane worked closely with an expert in the field in order to get into character. What she learned while doing her research for the film left quite an impression on the actress. “The more I got exposed to the need for these people to exist, they’re angels,” said Lane. “They’re paid to do intervention against malicious attempts on the internet. I’m so naïve I didn’t know that viruses do not spontaneously occur, like in nature. I mean, doesn’t the term virus imply it just grew in a petri dish? We don’t know how. Oh no, some brainiac sat down and figured out how to make everybody miserable, like an arsonist. Why? Do you have nothing better to do with your life? I guess not. I don’t know what to say. I’m so disappointed in human beings and myself for not knowing better.”

Lane has teenagers at home - teenagers who do spend time on the internet. As a parent, Lane has set down rules for using the internet but she realizes, more so now after working on Untraceable, that there’s no way to be too cautious when surfing online. “The concern is in this story people fall victim to what they’re solicited,” explained Lane. “That’s automatically not the smartest choice, you know? You can fall uphill and get lucky or you can fall in the black hole and never come out again in this story. “

“A lot of people online the whole point, certainly when the internet was invented – even before the internet itself – being on computers in the 80s, we would invent a new identity,” said Lane. “And, ‘I’ll be so sexy online,’ and , ‘I’ll be 20 again,’ or whatever people have in their heads. Or, ‘I’ll get all the babes and I’ll have all my hair back,’ whatever people want. This was the vapidity of the original fantasy that people created about what being online was going to do for them. I mean, it’s just the lowest common denominator possible. So, it’s interesting what comes. We think it and then we make it real, to a certain degree. And then we have all these cautionary tales that grow out of it. I’m so glad the FBI exists I can’t tell you, after seeing what’s on the internet and how they’re stopping the bad guys.”

Lane was initially drawn to Untraceable because of the film’s social commentary. The basic premise is both relevant and disturbing. “There’s a couple of different co-existing, I guess, metaphors, if you will, that the film deals with,” explained Lane. “I wanted to know so much what they were going to be having on the radio in my character’s car when I was going to be driving to and from work because, as you can well imagine, it would be the talk everywhere. It would be a global issue. I’m saying here we are in one city dealing with this issue, but it would be global pretty quickly and what would you do to try and shut down and stop people from paying attention, if by paying attention it increased the problem? Therein lies the rub and the indictment of people and the anonymity that people [think] it’s okay. I don’t know what to say. I think there’s a pretty good, not litmus test, of who you are by seeing what you would choose to do alone in a room with a computer for four days. You know who you are by your tastes. You know who you are by that sort of thing, and there you are.”

Lane continued, “The indictment within our story too [is] that this online bad guy is excluding other people, so it’s really just an American indictment issue. He’s accomplishing a lot with one blow; [he has] many agendas. I like movies that make me think. To do a thriller like this, I wanted it to be smart enough to make me think, and it does.”