In a role that ought to have been earmarked for Harrison Ford, Diane Lane plays a foxy lady investigator whose devotion to the line of duty puts her family in jeopardy. As a member of the FBI’s special computer super geek division, she’s on the trail of a diabolical cyber-killer whose fiendish Saw-alike devices are triggered by the number of hits his snuff website receives. Soon enough, her friends and colleagues start to disappear only to turn up in baths of acid at this sinister domain. Idle teenagers and shut-ins keep the hits coming until the unfortunate victims are duly cooked, dismembered or otherwise dispatched.
Sadly, the film is dogged by the perennial malfunctions of the cyber-thriller. It simply cannot find a grammar to make a bunch of people sitting at computer screens look any more interesting than they might do in a civil service office. More annoying still is the film’s tendency to infantilise its audience by always having someone around who requires detailed explanations for such space age terms as “IP address” or “website”. Whoa. Like slow down there, Einstein.
At its best, Untraceable functions well enough as disposable Hollywood trash but its alarming technophobia soon eclipses the nuts and bolts. Often recalling a public information film from the ’50s it continually strays into hysteria. Did you know your children could be using the ‘internet’ to kill people right now? You wonder why they didn’t just smash up looms for an hour-and-a-half.