Movie review: 'Untraceable'

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1 1/2 stars (out of four)

“The Silence of the Lambs” didn’t need all those Academy Awards to legitimize its pulp wares in the eyes of Hollywood. The grosses took care of that. There are times, though, when that film’s sweep of the top 1991 Oscars seems truly unfortunate. I mean, for years we’ve had to suffer dozens of infernal fancypants serial-killer forays, where the killer is guided through his evildoing by a twisted moral code.

The latest, “Untraceable,” owes everything to “Lambs,” and to “Se7en,” and to all the “Lambs” and “Se7en” knockoffs made by directors less talented than Jonathan Demme and David Fincher. In addition to being dull, the Portland, Ore. -set “Untraceable” is a monster hypocrite, wagging its finger at the mass audience’s appetite for strictly regimented, “creative” torture scenarios. This film is not really in a position to point a finger.

Diane Lane saves it from total worthlessness . She plays an FBI cyber-crimes specialist on the hunt for the psychotic mastermind behind a Web site called killwithme.com, a snuff film operation that plays out in real time. The more people who click on the site to watch the killer’s latest victim die in some miserable way—being fried alive by heat lamps, or dunked in a vat of battery acid—the faster the victim expires.

Lane is a gratifying actress in many ways. She’s in her early 40s and hasn’t traded her original face in for a new one. After a couple of decades in the business she has gotten markedly better in recent films (the roles have gotten better, too, present character excepted). Lane, tough but easygoing, has discovered the virtues of on-screen simplicity and directness.

Mary Beth Hurt plays Lane’s mother, and she’s also reliably fine, though at one point early in “Untraceable” Hurt is working a mean-looking mulcher in the garden and you know instantly that the tool will make a sinister reappearance. The quantity of the violence in “Untraceable” (medium, I guess you’d say) isn’t the issue. Recent, horror-centric efforts such as “The Descent” or “28 Weeks Later” were far bloodier than this picture. They happened also to be exceptionally suspenseful, and the gore didn’t make you feel debauched or sullen. By contrast “Untraceable,” directed by Gregory Hoblit, is a two-faced bummer. It sets up the usual charnel-house contraptions, then shakes its head at the depravity of it all.

mjphillips@tribune.com

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