Movie Review - Untraceable

Just got back from seeing a midnight advanced screening of Untraceable. This was another movie I have been salivating over seeing since the first time I saw the trailer back in November.

While everyone else was watching the First Look behind the scene segment program for the various upcoming movies and tv shows (that I have already seen for this month), I was scrolling thru all of the imdb comments about this movie, to prepare myself for what others thought. Quite a few people agreed that it was the cross between a CSI episode and Saw. I will mostly agree with that. But the few who said that it was a feardotcom duplicate? No. Nothing like it. The only comparison between the two would be the website usage in the movies. And while I have already said that I enjoyed feardotcom, this movie was better. Then again, to be fair, it's not in the same category. Feardotcom is a horror movie. Untraceable is a thriller. Crime-thriller, but thriller. NOT a horror movie.

Basic story: Jennifer Marsh is an FBI agent for the Cyber Crime unit and while she is finishing up catching an illegal downloader, she is handed a sticky with killwithme.com written on it. Visiting the site shows an animal being slowly tortured and the feed is streaming live. They do a "whois" to try to track down the site and they shut it down, but it comes right back up and it is discovered that there are many mirror sites and showing that they are coming from thousands of different IP servers that are changing every few seconds. The more people that tune in, the faster the creature is killed. Unfortunately because it is "just an animal", Jennifer's boss does not see the point in digging further into finding out where this sicko is. Until they end up seeing a man in the same location as the animal was in and he is being fed a coagulant which is tied to the machine so the more people that log on to watch, the faster the syrum flows into him until he literally bleeds to death. And the killer seems to be taking victim after victim with each one dying faster than the last because of everyone's interest in the site.

The cool thing is that it DOES kinda play out like a CSI episode, but the computer part - maybe because of the way they directed the scenes - reminded me a lot of The Net (one of my favorite movies). You know almost immediately the who, where, and how, but you don't find out until the end the why. AND it was nice to see a movie that was NOT a flashback. (You all know how I HATE flashback movies.) And what is interesting...not sure how they planned this out...the first victim dies 1/23/08. C R E E P Y....

I like Diane Lane. I think she's a good actress. But I liked her performance in Murder at 1600 much better than Untraceable. She just seemed kinda hum-drum. Maybe because I kept picturing Sandra Bullock reprising her Angela Bennett role. :] No real "jump" moments, but quite a few disturbing scenes in both gore and in the comments that people were posting while the people were being tortured. In my opinion, it's a good movie to see on the big screen, but not necessary and once it comes out on dvd, the two things I will be looking forward to the most are seeing the closed captioned version - because there were a few newscasts that were overlapping each other and I'd like to see what they were all saying. And I would also like to be able to pause the individual scenes to read all of the posts that were made that you only see a few seconds of. (I usually do that when watching a CSI episode when they show a newsclipping...I guess I'm weird that way.)

Um...what else....trying to think about this while it's still fresh in my mind. Because you know zombie girl will make her appearance at work in just a few short hours...

Oh, yeah. There were a few slow parts that they could have cut out. I mean, it's nice that you know that she has a kid but, my opinion is the brat didn't have to be in the story for it to still be a good movie. Sorry...but she was a brat. A cute brat, but still a brat.

Another thing...I reported someone for a review posted on imdb for blurting out who the killer is without displaying a spoiler alert, so just be sure not to read any of that if you want to still be a little bit surprised.

And be sure to visit http://www.killwithme.com/ and the REAL killwithme website which is http://www.killwithus.com/ but beware....this is the real thing so do you dare participate in someone else's death?

Which was a weird thing that kept going thru my mind as I was watching....the FBI kept the killwithme website up and told everyone not to visit it yet THEY kept visiting it. So....not to sound stupid, but didn't THEY contribute to the deaths, as well? Or because it was each ADDITIONAL visitor that added to the torture, since they were already on, it didn't count....? Dunno.

Good movie. Probably don't need to see again til it comes out on dvd because I can pretty much remember everything that happened, but I'm VERY glad I got to be one of the first to see it. It was well worth it!

Let me know what you thought.

Vixy :]