David Dickstein Movie Review

Untraceable

Streaming live videos of his murders on an Internet site, the villain of “Untraceable” is one sick webmaster. Too sadistic for You Tube, the content he shares is more appropriate for a portal called You Die. But since that URL was apparently unavailable, this cyber sadist posts on www.killwithme.com, and the way things work is the more people who visit the site, the quicker his victims log off. Permanently.

Morbid, yes, but entertaining? Well, if movies like “Saw,” “Se7en” and “Feardot.Com” float your bloodied boat, you should have a perverse picnic watching ever-reliable Diane Lane as Jennifer Marsh, an agent in the FBI’s Internet crimes division. The widowed single mother thinks she’s seen every type of computer-driven crime until tasked with tracking down the wacko with Wi-Fi and a webcam. At first she and her partner Griffin (Colin Hanks) dismiss the Web site as relative minor – it’s a stranded cat on a rat glue trap, after all, not a human strapped to an elaborate death machine (yet). But when the host directs users to spread the word virally through social media, and they do, the poor kitty is no-mo in slo-mo. The agents agree that it’s only a matter of time before the webmaster moves from pets to people.

What ensues is a cat-and-computer-mouse chase, if you will, and, of course, it’s a race against the clock to ensnare this psycho geek with the killer app. Director Gregory Hoblit (“Fracture,” “Primal Fear”), working off a script credited to three writers, does a decent job keeping the suspense high, though it’s kinda hard not to muster goosebumps when showing people die by acid bath and megawatt sunlamp.

3 of 4 Stars, Rated R, 100 minutes