Review: Lane is saving grace in ‘Untraceable’

Directed by: Gregory Hoblit

Starring: Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks, Joseph Cross

Rated: R

It’s been 13 years since Hollywood unleashed the initial surge of movies prominently using the Internet as a milieu.

“The Net,” “Virtuosity” and “Hackers,” all ostensibly thrillers, were released in 1995.

Three years later, the romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail,” a cyber-inclusive remake of the classic 1940 film “The Shop Around the Corner,” came out, but it’s surprising, considering how ubiquitous the Internet has become, that more movies haven’t hopped on the bandwagon.

Gregory Hoblit, who directed the compelling but flawed “Fracture,” follows that film with “Untraceable,” a movie that adds elements of horror to the Internet drama genre.

It’s being promoted as this year’s “The Silence of the Lambs,” but nobody is predicting it’s going to win any Oscars, much less pull off the grand slam that Jonathan Demme did with his now-classic film. “Lambs” won the five big Oscars and more than three dozen other prestigious awards.

“Untraceable” does have some ghoulish charms, however.

The basic plot is a grabber: A computer geek devises a number of ways to commit murder and broadcast it, in real-time streaming video, on the Web. The number of hits his site (and latest victim) gets determines how quickly said victim is terminated. It’s a chilling and entirely believable twist on serial-killing psychos.

Casting Diane Lane, an eminently watchable actress, as the lead was a wise choice, too.

But sadly, after a decent first act and an OK middle, the film gets extremely tedious.

Lane, who has been a radiant screen presence since her debut, plays FBI agent Jennifer March. March is assigned to cruising the Internet looking for the usual suspects, which (sad to say) includes pedophiles posing as chat-room chums, child-porn freaks and various and sundry unsavory manner of scum.

She comes upon a site called Killwithme.com.

Anyone who has even a passing knowledge of computer technology knows that with the readily available tools, anything can be faked. So, March isn’t sure what to think when the site shows an anonymous sicko torturing and killing a cat, while telling his visitors they are contributing to the animal’s demise.

Things get taken up a notch when Killwithme’s next specimen is a human. The methods the killer employs are always somewhere between a Rube Goldberg cartoon contraption and something Edgar Allan Poe may have concocted if he were still around. Each victim gets a new and more gruesome torture device. There’s the blood-thinning injections, the bank of heat lamps, the battery acid slowly infusing a water tank and the slow drop into rotating blades. You get the picture. To Hoblit’s credit, these scenes aren’t as gratuitous as those in popular films of late such as “Hostel” and the “Saw” series.

March and her partner are obviously computer geeks themselves, and the script has Lane rattling off a slew of cyber-babble explaining why the killer’s site is thoroughly “untraceable.” This is when the film’s credibility starts to crumble. It might take a high school-aged, lifelong computer user to trace something like this down, but without a doubt, everything posted on the Web leaves a footprint and can be traced.

The killer begins dumping the victims’ bodies in carefully considered locations.

March lives with her aging mother, 8-year-old daughter and a psychic cat (all cats in this type of film have ESP, it seems), without a man around to “protect” them. Ergo, it becomes painfully obvious that the killer will soon be wreaking havoc on the March manor.

I could watch Lane in anything. “A Walk on the Moon” is one of my favorite romantic films, as is “A Little Romance.” To her credit, she never cracks here. Many times an actor who is performing material that is less than his or her caliber begins to look pained midway through the film. That always makes things worse.

Lane is a trooper, indeed. “Untraceable” may prove to be more satisfying as an offhand, let’s-just-rent-a-DVD-tonight viewing experience, and Lane’s performance makes it palatable at the very least.

Jim Wunderle owns Wunderle Sound Services and is a Springfield freelance writer and musician. He can be reached at info@wunderlesound.com.