The Internet, and Why It Wants to Kill You: Untraceable”

Oh that rascally Internets! That malevolent series of tubes (not, I repeat not, a truck!) which helps you wile away the hours of your life shopping, dating, paying bills, catching up with news, and…MURDER! At least that what the good and not-terribly-Internet-savvy folks who made Untraceable would have you believe. See, in their view the Internet has not only made us more connected, it has also made us into serial killers and the ghouls who live vicariously through them. I can just imagine how screenwriters Bryan Fyvolent and Mark Brinker pitched their script: “It like Seven, but online!” And the corpulent movie producer catching their pitch opened his mental dictionary to Internet and came up with: “That magical device that allows you to look at porn while you’re at work.” And it got green-lit. Seriously, I’d bet a kidney that’s how it happened.

 

And that’s pretty much what we got, but without the porn. In Untraceable, a serial killer is kidnapping people and killing them slowly, while streaming the video online. The more people that click to his site, the faster the person dies. One guy, for example, is baked under heat-lamps, which get progressively hotter as more people check out the site. Chasing him is brilliant FBI agent and cyber-crimes specialist Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) and her stalwart partner/assistant/sacrificial lamb Griffen Dowd (Colin Hanks). How brilliant is this duo? Well, they both manage to get ambushed and kidnapped by the killer, so really not-that-brilliant.

 

Lane turns in a good performance in a cardboard-cutout of a role. She paces, furrows her brow (to show she’s thinking real hard), and manages to keep the movie’s ridiculousness more or less at bay. Lane is aging past her sexy, brown-eyed-babe period and is unafraid to show the lines and sags of her face. She deserves some credit for that. She also deserves better starring roles, but that’s a no-brainer.

 

Director Gregory Hoblit—who’s helmed such forgettable cinematic oatmeal as Frequency, Fallen, and Hart’s War—sets the movie in Portland, which gives him license to immerse the movie in torrential rain. It still doesn’t look like Seven. There’s nothing to his technique as a director that rises above your average episode of CSI and its ilk. He even manages to screw up the tension (hee hee)-building moment he ripped off from Silence of the Lambs. Remember when Clarice Starling is interviewing Jame Gumb in his house and Demme cuts between the interview and the FBI getting ready to raid it? Only to reveal, once Clarice is in real danger, that the FBI was at the wrong house? Well, Hoblit rips that off, except he’s already tipped the viewer off to the fact that the FBI is hitting the wrong house. Nicely done, Greg.

 

The movie’s shaky on its tech side as well. The cyber-crimes unit throws around a lot of jargon to explain why they can’t trace the site, but it has the overly-intricate sound of the technobabble that used to comprise about 70% of the dialogue in the various Star Trek series’. The screenwriters seem to know of only one semi-legitimate cyber-criminal tactic–the Trojan horse—and they use it repeatedly. Not fifteen minutes of the movie can go by without someone using the phrase “back door Trojan horse.” As a matter of fact, they say “back door Trojan horse” so often I started to wonder if this movie wasn’t heading in a much weirder (but probably more interesting) direction.

 

But really all logic goes out the window by the time the killer hacks into Jennifer’s car’s computer (uh, what?) and uses it to shut down the car and lock her inside (uh what?), so he can talk to her via her OnStar system (uh, what?) Jennifer tries to call for help, only to find he’s hacked her cell phone as well (oh, come on!). I suppose if she’d given him the chance he’d’ve hacked her digital watch and made her late for work.

 

The morality of the movie is as illogical as the rest of it. Unlike Seven, which did genuinely creepy things to our sense of right and wrong, Untraceable’s moral outrage is completely ersatz. It wants to condemn our Internet culture of Two Girls and a Cup and Ogrish.com, while at the same time giving the audience exactly the spectacle it’s railing against. The backstory explaining the killer’s deeds doesn’t really make a lot of sense (nasty voyeurism pre-dates the Internet after all). I kept expecting there to be some twist at the end of the film revealing that the killer had actually snuck a backdoor Trojan horse into the computers of all his bloodthirsty site visitors that would cause their computers to come to life in the middle of the night and, I dunno, bite them in the butt or something. No joy. This movie can’t even be bothered to remember who it’s mad at.

 

The movie’s treatment of the risks of the Internet is even more rudimentary. Far from being any kind of a tool, Hoblit sees the Internet as simultaneously a porthole to hell and a means for other people to control your life and abduct you. Jennifer’s hacked car (!) and phone (!!) allow her the killer to get the drop on her (!!!) and Griffen’s use of the Internet for dating is his downfall (it’s unnatural, I tells ya!). Because the Internet can, apparently, impersonate someone’s voice.

 

But the funniest part of Untraceable had to be when Jennifer implores her bosses to ask the NSA to use their “supercomputer” to catch the bad guy. Yep, supercomputer—singular. I guess the NSA only has one massive computer it uses. I’d like to think it has a lot of blinking lights and reels and knobs like something out of Doctor No.

 

Additional Note: When I was polygraphed at the FBI’s New York Field Office, they were just updating their computer systems. There were stacks of what must have been 286 hard drives with 5.25” floppy drives. So after 9/11, the FBI still used the same computers I’d played Pong on in grade school. I can’t help but think Hoblit would approve of that.