Untraceable

[slickstu]

The mainstay of maverick film makers like Eli Roth, Takashi Miike and Alexandre Aja, torture porn is now getting the Hollywood treatment. The trouble is, Hollywood doesn't have the stomach for the genre and the result is akin to Frank Bennett's cover of Radiohead's Creep: the words and the tune are there, and it's undeniably entertaining, but it's missing the rawness of the genuine article. It's too clean, too nice, too civilised to be truly unsettling. It doesn't look or feel dangerous like SAW or Hostel, films the like of which Untraceable clearly takes its influence. It's just a bit, well, gutless.

The plot concerns an unstable young chap (Joseph Cross) who creates a website called (yes, it is a real site - click the link, it works), a webcam site where he submits unfortunate individuals to SAW-style traps with the gimmick that the greater the number of surfers who log onto his site, the faster the demise of his victim. Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) and Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) are FBI agents assigned to snare the unhinged antagonist.

Given the technological nature of the premise, technical feasibility was always going to be a sticking point with this film and boffin cynics will find plenty to snigger and scoff at here. Also there are several glaring flaws in logic which are difficult to overlook and by the end of the film you'll be wondering how the Feds didn't put the pieces together much, much sooner.

The film is essentially a social comment on the publics' insatiable appetite for the grotesque and the ease at which the internet dishes it up. This is certainly a valid topic worthy of serious discussion though here it is merely presented for the purposes of entertainment. Nevertheless, despite its numerous shortcomings, the film does succeed in being fundamentally entertaining and there are much worse thriller/horror flicks around at the moment, vis-a-vis Prom Night.

6.5 out of 10

[DND]

Yep not to bad 7-10