Title: Untraceable
Genre: Crime, Thriller
Cast: Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks, …
Director: Gregory Hoblit
Release: (2008)
Finally! It’s been a long wait but at last, five years after the second installment, the much-anticipated final chapter of Diane Lane’s supremely eclectic Un– trilogy is here to answer all the questions left over from the first two episodes: –Faithful and –Der the Tuscan Sun. Will we finally find out what made Connie change her name to Frances and move to Tuscany? Will we finally find out what happened to Richard Gere while she was there?? Will Patti and Grace get back together??? And what about the baby????
No, no, no idea and who knows. In Un– III: –Traceable, new director Gregory Hoblit preserves the enigmatically disjointed tradition that has become the signature of this franchise, by randomly picking up the story in Portland, Oregon where Connie/Frances has inexplicably moved to and, once again, changed her name and started a new life. Known to her new friends as Jennifer Marsh now, Lane’s Jackal-like heroine has landed a job in the cyber-crimes department of an FBI field office. Along with techie partner Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks), Marsh spends most of her days tracking down identity thieves and other kinds of sophisticated cyber-grifters, and most of her nights taking care of young daughter Annie. (Could she be Patti’s baby all grown up? Or perhaps the lifelong memory of a Tuscan fling? Hoblit leaves the audience hanging to try to figure out this tantalizing morsel by themselves.) Until all of their worlds are turned upside down by the emergence of an internet serial killer whose computer savvy has made him impossible to trace, and whose methods are designed to make every new killing harder and harder for the FBI to stop. Known only as the “Moderator”, he hooks his victims up to torturous contraptions on camera for his website, which are then wired into a traffic monitor that controls their engagement. The more hits to the site – the faster the contraptions torture and kill the victims. And with each execution, word of the site spreads to ensure an even greater flood of traffic for the next time. Leaving Marsh, Dowd, and Special Agent Box (I don’t know), played by Billy Burke, scrambling to piece together any clues they can to track down this modern-day Demon Blogger of Fleet Street before his camera goes live again.
After an erotic thriller and then a romantic comedy, Hoblit also honors the unpredictable genre tradition of the trilogy by surprising even some of its most savvy followers with a gore-heavy suspense story that occasionally flirts with the realm of torture porn. Which, by itself, would have been fine – his movie, his choice, I don’t have a problem with whatever people want to watch. But I do have to call out Hoblit a little here for the absolute hypocrisy he shows in trying to deliver a moral value judgment on the depravity of today’s society in the subtext of his multi-million dollar snuff film. A passing comment on the complexity of dealing with new ethical questions in the ever-changing internet age would have been fine, maybe even a nice, little takeaway thought to leave the audience with. But Hoblit and the rest of his Wilderland cast and crew go out of their way throughout the film to decry the incomprehensible sickness of the awful, inhuman, wretched sadists who would actually be depraved enough to watch any of the uncontrolled content on the internet. It’s hard to describe a specific example without giving away specific plot points or scenes that I wouldn’t want to spoil for anyone planning to see it, but there are plenty throughout the movie and they’re not exactly what you’d call “abstract”. A typical scene might be something like:
(Agents Marsh and Box watching computer screen)
Agent Marsh: My God, he’s got another one.
Agent Box: Turn it up.
(Eight minutes of watching bound and gagged victim be graphically torn apart by some maniacally horrific torture device)
Agent Marsh: Who are all the people logging on to watch this? What kind of society do we live in that would create the monsters who consider this entertainment? How did they become so desensitized to the pain of another human being? Don’t they understand that it would go away if they just didn’t watch it? Where is their humanity? Their compassion? Their soul?
Agent Box: I don’t know … but they make me sick.
(One more minute of victim’s final few breaths escaping from the bloody and mangled remains of an corpse no longer recognizable to the naked eye as human remains - which will be lightly edited and featured in aggressive viral marketing campaign for the film)
I know it’s not commonly considered fair to do, but I think this is one case where it’s pretty safe to shoot the messenger. Let’s just say the filmmakers came off a little preachy with their message about what kinds of sick images people will watch, in their movie full of sick images for people to watch. You can’t have your cake and cram it down a half-naked cheerleader’s throat until she chokes to death on it, too.
But to be fair, that wasn’t the only message woven into the subtext of this film. The studio (I presume) added their own little morality lesson also, all but equating movie piracy with cold-blooded murder in the world of cybercrimes. Nice touch – very subtle. Makes me want to go online and murder a copy of Tropic Thunder, right now.
Aside from the preachiness and transparent industry propaganda, the movie itself was an entertaining enough thriller for anyone whose internet connection is down for a few hours and needs something else to do. Diane Lane is always worth watching (read that however you want), and Colin Hanks is, uhh, at least near Diane Lane in a lot of scenes. Long-time fans of the whole Un– trilogy will be intrigued and likely left with enough new questions to fuel message board debates for years to come. And for you newbies, have no fears, I promise you don’t need to have seen the first two to understand what’s going on in this one.
Grading
Story: B
Acting: B-
Visuals: C
Originality/Innovation: C
Enjoyability: C-
Overall: C
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