“Untraceable” is rated R for grisly violence, torture and some language.
Tempo grade: C+
Review by Rick Romancito, The Taos News
If there’s one thing that can be gleaned from the pulp fiction at the soul of “Untraceable,” it’s that the Internet has become a cesspool of humanity’s worst intentions and that we should be grateful there are cyber-cops surfing with the aliens.
The setup is simple. Someone in cyberspace has created a Web site that opens with a teaser question, “Kill With Me?” Upon entering, visitors see a real human being hooked up to a device that will gradually kill him or her depending on the number of people who log on. Alongside the live video feed is a chat room where visitors can add their comments, which generally tend to egg on the proceedings. This, of course, makes everyone who visits the site an accomplice to the murder. Because of the Web’s perceived anonymity — which, big surprise, is known to appeal to the worst instincts of users — the site is an instant hit.
There is a real promo site associated with the movie called www.killwithme.com.
When you go to it and click on “enter,” a prompt appears that says, “Warning, visiting this site could cause harm to innocent people. Do you still want to enter?” If you click “yes,” prepare to have your little hand smacked by a statement that says “91 percent of you ignored the warning. Where are your morals?” Ouch.
Back to the movie: The daily grind for single mom and FBI cyber-crimes agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) is usually made up of investigating illegal download providers and ferreting out potential child exploitation creeps. At first, when she and her team find out about the site, they think it might be a hoax, but a little more digging reveals that the victim is real and what happens is equally as genuine.
What follows is a fairly suspenseful cat-and-mouse thriller that comes off as one of those bad paperback suspense novels you pick up at a flea market because you had a couple of nickels rattling around in your pocket, something in which Director Gregory Hoblit (“Fracture,” “Primal Fear”) seems to specialize.
Deriving much of its momentum from hints of torture porn hits like “Saw” and TV police procedurals like “CSI,” Hoblit’s movie banks on the fact that quite a few Web-users still regard this investigative domain of basic instinct as mysterious and somewhat magical. This can only explain why filmmakers continue to depict tech-savvy criminals and cops conducting clearly impossible hacker tricks. But mixing obviously fake wizardry with for-real functions makes a movie like this seem plausible to anyone who used that free disc they got in the mail to obtain their Internet service.
That’s not to say somebody could come up with a heinous concoction like this, but with real cyber cops out there peeking in on your IP address, who’d want to try?
This review was published in the Jan. 31, 2008 edition of Tempo, the arts and entertainment magazine of The Taos News. Visit www.taosnews.com.
0 Responses to “Cyber pulp fiction”