Post by BIGFANBOY on Jan 25, 2008 4:07:44 GMT -5
UNTRACEABLE
Review by Gary Dean Murray
Diane Lane is a favorite on the Silver Screen. In her decades long career she always manages to look wonderful and give interesting readings of her characters. So it has to make one wonder what nefarious plot was concocted to make her be in this piece of ‘torture porn’ known as Untraceable.
The idea of ‘torture porn’ truly came into vogue with the movie Saw. That little independent ditty took the idea of a horror flick and turned it on its ear. The killer isn’t just happy to get rid of the victim; he now has to make it a show. The death isn’t sudden jolt like in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but it is a drawn out spectacle. Unlike classic flicks such as The Black Cat or The Pit and the Pendulum where the violence was shown off-screen, these films revel in their blood and bile. It is abuse meant to arouse - torture porn.
This newest entry Untraceable keeps the torture in the milieu of a cop drama. Diane Lane plays Jennifer Marsh, a FBI agent in the Cyber Crimes Division in Portland. She is a widow with a cute school age daughter and takes the night shift job so she can spend time with her kid. The agents get a lead on a web site called KillWithMe.com where a kitten is caught in a rat trap, slowly dying. As sick as this is, the red flag doesn’t go all the way up until the next victim is shown; a man with “Kill With Me” cut across his chest. A blood thinner agent is attached with an IV. A counter is connected to the entire apparatus. The more hits the web site gets, the faster the man will die. And in our internet savvy, devil may care world guess what all the hits do - they hasten his demise. By the by, that is the moral of our little drama - that everyone is culpable. Well, our agent and her partner Dowd (Colin Hanks) get help from the local detective (Billy Burke). They all figure that this is not a series of random events (shock) and the killer is in Portland (shock, shock). The exercise of this film is for the hunt for the killer and for the motive behind the events. Along the way we get a reporter baked to death under a series of heat lamps and a cop trapped in a vat of water that is slowly made acidic which peels the skin off his body. We are also shown the killer and the method behind his madness.
The biggest fault of Untraceable is by director Gregory Hoblit. He forgets that old axiom that ‘sometimes less is more’. By giving us every little detail in these monstrous deaths, he leaves nothing for the imagination. The scary thing about Jaws and Alien (and The Black Cat) was in the fact that we didn’t see everything. When the imagination of the audience has to fill in the blanks, the terror works on a different and more powerful level. The trio that penned this little piece of torment must have raided the closet of the Saw franchise, looking for something original and came up empty handed. This is another paint by number cop thriller with gruesome deaths.
As much as I hated most of this movie, I liked the performance of Diane Lane. Somehow she rises above every cliché this screenplay generates and puts a fresh spin on the proceedings. She is still one of the prettiest actresses working in Hollywood. But, every male good guy in the film could be just inter-changeable parts of a machine. They are really nothing more than cogs waiting to be thrown in the shredder. Even if you wrap it in a pretty bow, sick torture is still sick torture. As much as I despised Untraceable, I can see that it is going to make a ton of money which isn’t a good reflection on our society.
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