Untraceable

** Stars

Untraceable is the definition of hypocrisy on the front page of Hypocrisy For Dummies (If there really is a book called that, you can sue me for copyright infringement). The message Untraceable tries to tell us is that our internet world is filled with disturbing psychos who are entertained by torture porn. Let's bring back Danny Glover from my Shooter review...His answer would be, really?

So where does the hypocrisy lie in all this? Well Untraceable wants to help send a message to viewers that you should be careful about the internet and who’s out there. So the first thing it does is it creates a site that shows a human being killed based on the number of hits it receives. It graphically shows a victim being tortured numerous times in ways that would make Water-Torture look like a slip-n-slide. I guess it's acceptable to make a movie to show the evidence and then play with the carcasses.

The cast deserves better material than this. Diane Lane turns in a solid paycheck playing Jennifer Marsh, a secret service agent caught up in an internet cat-and-mouse game with a killer who starts an internet site tapping into the dark fetishes of perverted people (which apparently is torture-porn). The killer starts a site where people are tortured and killed live on the site killwithme.com for the whole world to see. The catch? The more that log on to the site, the faster the victim dies. In some scenes, Untraceable has the counter on the site splurging past twenty-five million people and counting. That means twenty-five times the state I'm from (New Hampshire) is getting off to this site. Look, I understand what the film is trying to say, but it doesn't need to rub it in my face.

When the film isn't on the internet, it has its chance to be an intelligent thriller. Some scenes are tightly put together, especially with the relationship between Marsh and her co-worker Griffin Dowd, played by the underrated Colin Hanks (when is this guy going to get his big break?) Dowd is set up as a cliche, with his inability to get girls and meets girls online. But the film actually has an ironic twist with his character when the killer finds out who Marsh and Dowd are, but it only comes out to another scene of torture porn. I will give you a synopsis of what they use for torture porn in one sentence: Someone gets soaked in a pool of battery acid and you slowly watch him dissolve into a sulfuric being. It's just lovely. So with the help of Detective Eric Box (Billy Burke), Dowd, and the rest of her FBI team, Marsh tries to stop this killer before he hurts the people she loves.

The film had its chances to scare the audience, but it falls back on graphic violence. The thought of something happening is much scarier than actually showing it to us because the imagination of the brain is uncontrollable. If this is the kind of material people want on the internet, then I guess my site will never become popular.