Untraceable Details

Now there's an hour and a half of my life i'll never get back tut !!

Horror ! Thriller ! errm I think not ...... I never make reviews but this time I really felt the need to speak out, so PLEASE do not waste your time with this complete and utter dribble, the trailer makes the film out to be ' edge on your seat horror' but it completely misses the mark, I mean it was nearer the cornerflag than the goal!

I enjoyed Saw fot the ingenious contraptions and gore, I also liked the my little eye/fear.com for the tension and twists , but this film simply has nothing to offer, oh no wait................nope can't think of anything please once again don't waste your time.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Effective thriller that revels in what it seeks to condemn

Imagine , if you will, a cross between the twisted gore torture of the original Saw and the high tech shenanigans of films like Cellular or The Net. For that is the premise for Untraceable - an exciting and tense thriller that revels in the visceral excesses the web potentially offers while at the same time condemning it. But since when has Hollywood let a stumbling block like hypocrisy get in the way. Single mum Jennifer Marsh (Dianne Lane excellent) works for the FBI,s tech surveillance monitoring internet chartrooms and websites. These guys are so clever that they can track a perpetrator hacking someone else's wi-fi to within a few metres and even more impressively the police will be around there quicker than a double glazing salesman scenting a lead which is the surest indication that this film isn’t set in Britain . Jennifer and her colleague Griffin (Colin Hanks) , the archetypal computer nerd are suddenly faced with a sinister new site -'Killwithme.com'( which actually exists and is used to promote the film ) where a cute little kitten is being electrocuted the twist being that the more hits the site gets the quicker the kitten dies. This would seem to be bad enough ( especially if you love little kitty’s) but after her boss ignores her warnings , proclaiming pompously that they have better things to do , the killer starts abducting human victims who are despatched with horrific methods and with increasing rapidity as the sites popularity explodes most of them it would seem oblivious that this makes them accomplices to murder. They might know their interwebs and modem server thingy’s but when it comes to the law these people are real numb nuts Then the killer starts to target members of the team and Jennifer herself and what’s more he’s so tech savvy he has made him/herself untraceable. In many ways Untraceable delivers pretty much everything you would expect of a decent thriller though it also embraces several thriller clichés. The idea behind the film is fiendishly clever and it kept me perched precariously on the edge of my seat. Yet it also felt a little out of date. Ten years ago or even maybe five this would have been an innovative cutting edge thriller . Now it just seems a touch rote. And the films central message, or what i took to be it’s central message , that un- regulated the web offers succulent opportunities for sicko,s -those that would commit them and those who get voyeuristic pleasure from their acts- can hardly be taken seriously when the film itself revels in them. In order for this to work director Gregory Hoblit would have had to make the film audience feel some complicity in the crimes and this he fails to do. Yet taken in pure cinematic context Untraceable works . It’s far fetched for sure especially when it comes to the killers motivating factor, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Curiously this is probably the films biggest failure .How odd.