After browsing the reviews last week, the general consensus seemed to be that Untraceable was a below-average cop thriller which bordered on torture porn, and based on those reviews I had no desire to see it. But I'd forgotten all about that tonight, until the opening sequence of a kitten in a cat carrier in a dingy basement, meowing and scratching at its cage, begging to be let out, while a video camera records the whole thing. An unseen man places what appears to be a glue trap in front of the carrier, places some food on the other side of the trap to entice the kitten, then releases it from its cage. At this point, I was thinking that paying for this movie was a mistake.
I suddenly remembered the torture porn accusations from the reviews I'd read and I started to imagine the worst. As an animal lover who lost a beloved cat of my own in the past year, I found the tension in this scene almost unbearable, until a harsh light suddenly lit up the kitten's face, causing it to hiss, and then the film cut to a different location.
I had to give the filmmaker's credit for creating an extremely nerve-wracking scene without ever resorting to grisly images of feline flesh being torn apart, so I settled in to give the movie a fair chance.
Untraceable focuses on Jennifer Marsh, an FBI cybercrimes expert played by Diane Lane, presumably because Ashely Judd was unavailable. When Marsh and her coworkers, including a bland Colin Hanks, discover the website killwithme.com, they see a still frame of the kitten on the glue trap, and if it weren't for the dialogue I wouldn't have known for sure that the kitten was dead.
The movie shows similar restraint for most of the first act, even as Marsh watches grisly videos of suicides and tragic accidents on the internet. The camera usually focuses on the characters while small, grainy images play out on computer screens in the background, and I was thinking that Untraceable was shaping up to be a reasonably tasteful thriller with a message I could really get behind, i.e. condemning the voyeuristic desire to watch real violence online. But then the killer claimed his first human victim.
I've never seen a movie that was labelled as torture porn, such as the Saw or Hostel series, and if I have my way, I never will. So when the murderer started slowly killing people on-screen in increasingly bizarre ways while streaming the deaths for an online audience, the movie lost some of the respect it had earned during the opening. Although, I must admit, I was expecting a lot worse.
Yes, there is quite a bit of blood during the first torture scene, and extensive make-up work showing flesh being destroyed in various ways during later murders, but I didn't think it was drastically worse than images from other movies which critics have praised, such as Silence Of The Lambs or Se7en. The main difference is the amount of screen time given to the death scenes which play out in real-time, but is that any different from Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, released way back in 1971, which had equally lengthy murder scenes, minus all the special effects.
I'm not about to rush out and rent Saw IV after surviving Untraceable relatively unscathed, and I'm not saying the movie isn't grisly, but I'm not convinced that the movie deserves the torture porn label. The bulk of the images during the murder scenes focus on the victims' faces, the shocked reactions of the investigators who watch the killings online as they take place, or the cold, bemused expression of the killer. There are closeups and inserts of images that are designed to be revolting, but the movie does hold back more than I expected, albeit less than I would have liked.
As for the rest of the movie, it's an uneven police procedural with both its fair share of nice touches and ludicrous moments. It was shot in Portland, Oregon, so there's lots of wonderful scenery, unique locations, and interesting cityscapes that you wouldn't have gotten shooting in an over-used location like L.A., New York, or even here in Vancouver.
The film does get preachy at times, and its message is weakened by hypocritically showing the kind of violence it claims to loathe. It also relies on too many Hollywood clichés, such as when the killer deliberately taunts the investigators and eventually targets the woman in charge of the case.
On the plus side, the killer unexpectedly chooses men as his first three victims, which goes against the conventions of the genre, thereby making those scenes a little less tacky, and when the connection between the victims is finally discovered, I found the revelations quite clever and intriguing. And the basic premise - the more hits the killer's website gets, the faster his victims die, thereby making web surfers complicit in the crime - had great potential.
Diane Lane's performance keeps the film grounded in reality, and Billy Burk does nice work as the local cop assigned to the case. The fact they don't immediately fall into bed together makes this a better movie than it might have been, and the personal lives of the characters are handled in a way that's emotionally honest.
But the killer's increasingly elaborate torture devices become a bit silly, which may be why I didn't find them as disturbing as something more plausible, ie. a sick bastard with a big knife. And the way the killer finally ensnares his first female captive is laughable. He's supposed to be a technological wizard, but his expertise in that sequence completely destroyed the film's already thin credibility.
This genre is one I haven't paid much attention to for years now, and since seeing David Fincher's brilliant Zodiac several times this year, I think any movie that spends this much time focused on the bloody exploits of a brilliant sadistic killer will seem tacky and exploitative by comparison. So, all in all, Untraceable is a decent, occasionally formulaic and somewhat passé serial killer movie with moments of true inspiration, improved greatly by Diane Lane's performance and the fresh look of its locations.
See this movie if you liked: Kiss The Girls, Hannibal
PS - I can't remember which site I saw this on, but I read movie reviews somewhere that required the reviewer to list their biases to help readers better understand where the reviewer is coming from and if they're likely to react the same way. I think that's a brilliant innovation in the world of movie reviews, so I'll do the same thing now and in any future movie reviews I post here.
Biases
The Reviewer Likes: Diane Lane, rain-swept vistas, kittens
The Reviewer Hates: Blood and guts, recycled plot devices, doing laundry
