The trailer for UNTRACEABLE looks promising enough.  Set in the modern internet age of porn and voyeurism, the story centres on special web crime FBI agent, Jennifer Marsh (Dianne Lane).  As the film begins, she and her colleagues are drawn into a cat-and-mouse game with a nasty serial killer who believes in torture for revenge.  The killer’s identity is revealed rather early in the film as a kid, Owen Reilly (Joseph Cross) out for revenge.  The interesting premise is that he stages the killings ***censored*** torture live on the net such that as more people log on to the killer site, the quicker the victim dies.

Director Hoblit (PRIMAL FEAR) gets his technical stuff right with appropriate computer jargon and video images like the pop-up counter clicking away on the video screen.  But the script is all over the place in terms of narrative.  Noticeably, for example is the disappearance of characters such as Jennifer’s mother (Mary Kay Place) and daughter during the last third of the film. 

Oscar nominee Diane Lane is not bad as the down-to-earth investigator.  She looks pretty and ‘normal’ enough to rear a kid whilst working a strenuous job.  Trouble is that UNTRACEABLE does not do her sufficient justice.

The film is pretentious to pretend to relay a message that everyone already knows about – that human beings cannot help but love to watch kinky news.  What is weird is that UNTRACEABLE is advertised as a thinking woman’s film but turns out to be a SAW-type chick flick.  The torture set ups are nastier than torn limbs.  One victim (Tom’s son, Colin Hanks) is burned slowly by sulphuric acid and another by heat lamps.  It would be interesting to see how this film fares at the box-office.