Untraceable: Diane Lane Is a Cougar With a Gun!

A A A Comments (2) By Nathan Lee Wednesday, Jan 23 2008

Happiness is a warm gun.

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Opens at Metro and other theaters, Fri., Jan. 25. Rated R. 96 minutes.

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Regarding the irrelevance of Untraceable: First of all, torture is so 2007, and just because this drab little thriller with a flashy love of pain imagines itself a "critique of violence" doesn't make it any less superfluous. Second of all, untraceable? Ha! You wish. While it's true that the villain of our tale, a precocious psychopath hosting real-time snuff videos on the Internet, proves tricky to hunt down, the provenance of the movie itself is pitch-meeting obvious: The Silence of the Lambs meets Saw, dude. Diane Lane straps on the Clarice Starling stuff as Jennifer Marsh, special agent in the FBI cybercrime unit. Alerted to the Web site killwithme.com, Marsh and her geeky sidekick (Colin Hanks) watch in horror as some online nutjob tortures and kills Lulu the cat. Soon the Internet killer upgrades his crazy on human prey. Propped upright before a webcam, bleeding from deep incisions spelling "Want to kill with me?" across his chest, the latest victim is plugged into an anti-coagulant IV drip synched to a page-hit counter. The more people who watch, the quicker the drip goes; the quicker the drip, the faster he dies. His life, you see, depends entirely on...you! You as in YouTube, Time magazine person-of-the-year you, sadistic, voyeuristic, media-addled you. Hella subversive, no? Can't stop watching, can you? Feeling just a wee bit implicated, hmm?