On DVD: 'Untraceable' is Unembraceable

No film histories will be written about Untraceable. No two-hour documentaries about mythic feuds on the set will be produced about Untraceable. No film school professors will assign their students to dissect it shot by shot. No hipster video store clerk will fly his noir cred by displaying it on his "Staff Favorites" shelf. Twenty, thirty years from now, no Hollywood outfit will remake it to capitalize on the 00s retro-cool trend, and no homages will turn up in Quentin Tarantino Jr.'s pulp flicks. In short, Untraceable will be forgotten.

Wait, no it won't. My bad. As we move toward online digital rentals, more and more of us are taking our suggestions straight from the rental sites which recommend films based not on taste, but on an algorithm of taste. What am I talking about? Well, let's just get right down to Untraceable.

Imagine you're in the mood for Se7en, inarguably a great film, but you've seen it too many times. Well, according to the FOX-TV blurb on the back of the box, Untraceable is: "In the spirit of Seven [sic] and all the other great creepy, intense movies."

OK, sure, that's true. Untraceable is in the tradition of Se7en, in the sense that it's a serial killer flick where the highlight is the sheer creativity of the murders. But director Gregory Hoblit ain't no David Fincher (Hoblit directed an episode of Cop Rock, for fuzz sake). ABC-TV ups the ante on the front of the box with: "Untraceable is The Silence of the Lambs for the Internet age."

Um, OK. I suppose the argument could be made that because Lambs' protagonist was Jodie Foster and Untraceable's hero is Diane Lane, that they both serve some sort of feminist serial-killer-catcher demographic. But Lambs was a psychological shock masterpiece with characters and scenes that no viewer will ever shake from memory without the assistances of hypnotherapy. And Untraceable is just a shot at capturing a little of the trickle-down from the popularity of torture porn.

The production team almost says as much during the bonus features. In short, the film's about a cybercrimes agent in the FBI who is forced to stop paying attention to identity theft for a moment to deal with the small matter of a psychopath who engineers Rube-Goldberg slow-death machines and streams them on the Internet. The moral twist: the more hits he gets to his site, the slower his victim dies by the slow injection of blood decoagulant, immersion in battery acid, and other methods that would play well on YouTube.

Similar to the reaction to the Final Destination franchise, these deaths are the reason viewers keep watching and that's also where the brilliance in the film, if any, lies. The special effects doc is the only special feature worth watching; the rest focus on the actors and producers speaking in platitudes about the filmmaking process. The lack of vision or ambition reveals itself when director Hoblit basically says he only cast Colin Hanks as Lane's partner because of his last name, and Hanks delivers a slightly mocking synopsis of the film. You can almost read his mind: "Yeah, I know it's a throwaway film, but I really need to establish myself as an actor who can handle a diversity of roles."

Yes, Untraceable is the poor man's Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, all based on the formula of a competent but powerless cop tracking a psychopath who ultimately wants to be caught. But that's also how the film undermines its own premise. The killer isn't "untraceable" at all; they realize he's in the same city almost immediately and, in the final act, as the writer realizes he can't go on with the crazy killings forever and that at some point he'll need a happy ending, the plot conveniently twists so they can actually trace him using the ol' fashioned look-through-the-news-archives method.

Untraceable, I predict, is a film a lot more folks will see on DVD than in the theaters, where the flick only produced a $28 million domestic gross, simply because folks go to Netflix and Blockbuster believing that Hollywood can mimic brilliance by formula.

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