Untraceable is another one of those it's only a movie movies like Saw or Hostel where the only reason for anyone to see it is to see if they can keep their eyes peeled during the ghastly torture sequences. They should promote movies like this by listing the ways in which the victims are killed:1) Man's legs and arms are set in concrete so he can't move. Heat lamps are set up all around him so he roasts to death.
2) Man is tied up in a tank filled to his neck with water, and slowly but surely sulfuric acid is introduced into the mix.
3) Man is strung up and slit open and bled to death with constant injections of anticoagulants.
I'm telling you, people would line up around the block. It's the same with teen sex comedies: Get that R rating, and list in your adds the number of sex scenes and how many people get naked, and watch the teenagers line up with their older brothers.
I admit to getting a cheap thrill out of the ways in which filmmakers torture their characters. It's the same with car chases and shoot-outs. It hardly matters who gets shot or stabbed or propelled through the windshield, it's how it happens. I'm the only one in the world hoping for a fourth installment in the Final Destination franchise, that gleefully comic teen-death saga with death scenes constructed like the front gate to Mikey's house in The Goonies.
Untraceable follows Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane), an FBI cyber-crime specialist in Portland, Oregon, who sits in her cubicle all day browsing websites and chat rooms, looking for sexual predators. In the cubicle next door is Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks), a cute, four-eyed geek with baby fat on his cheeks, who can't seem to get himself a date. After a swift prologue in which they send the boys in blue out to bust down a door and catch a credit card thief (they get the search warrant in about a minute), they are alerted to an ominous website called killwithme.com, where it appears a cat is being given increasingly strong electrical shocks in accordance with how many people sign in to the site.
They shut down the site, but it pops right back up again. They run a trace, but the mastermind behind the sight has one of those devices common in films that bounces the signal all over the world, so they think he's broadcasting from Algeria or Guam, or whatever. There are scenes in this film where characters rattle off all this jargon about computers, and it sounds like they did their homework, so maybe a device like this exists after all.
Anyway, a couple days later, the sight pops back up, but instead of a cat getting tortured, there's a man there, strung up and bleeding to death, and the more people that sign in, the more he bleeds. He dies in a matter of hours. Subsequent victims die in a matter of minutes.
I have a problem with this. I know there are bands out there like Cannibal Corpse that have songs about what a bullet does to your brain, and the web is chock full of sights dedicated to blood and guts, and the video shelves, when I was a child, were stocked with Faces of Death videos, those faux-snuff films of skydivers landing in alligator pits and rednecks skinning cats. And I mentioned my own fascination with watching violence in films. But I would never tune in to an execution, let alone contribute to a murder, and I find it hard to believe, with what little optimism I have for this jaded world, that 16,000,000 viewers would tune in to a live streaming video of a man melting in a vat of acid when they have been warned in news casts that if they go to this sight, they are an accomplice to the crime.
The pessimism of this film is what ruined it for me. Sure, I was still watching a slick thriller with Diane Lane and her daughter and her mother in peril, and I was still rooting for Colin Hanks to not die, but in the back of my mind, I was ashamed that the filmmakers had such a cynical outlook. Here we have Gregory Hoblit, an accomplished thriller director (his previous films include Primal Fear, Fallen, Fracture, and the much more imaginative Frequency) who knows how to choreograph suspense sequences, and how to make it rain (a lot in this case). He can even make me believe that there would be a cyber-crimes division of the FBI in Portland, Oregon. But he cannot make me buy into his cynical view of the world. Not to the degree to which it is portrayed in this film.
I guess without it, there would be no movie. That would be fine with me. I'm getting kind of tired of them anyway.
0 comments:
Post a Comment