Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Special Agent Jennifer Marsh works in an elite division of the FBI dedicated to fighting cybercrime. She thinks she has seen it all, until a particularly sadistic criminal arises on the Internet. This tech-savvy killer posts live feeds of his crimes on his website; the more hits the site gets, the faster the victim dies. Marsh and her team must find the elusive killer before time runs out.
Untraceable has a genuinely interesting premise tying internet voyeurism and collective moral responsibility to a serial killer narrative, giving it modest novelty for its era. The concept of crowd-sourced killing via website traffic was timely and provocative in 2008. Diane Lane anchors the film with a competent, grounded performance and the supporting cast is serviceable, but no one transcends the material. The plot holds together reasonably well in its first half but relies on increasingly implausible procedural shortcuts and convenient lapses in investigative logic. Cinematography is functional but unremarkable — dark, generic thriller lighting with little visual personality. The ending deflates rather than pays off the film's thematic promise, resolving things in a rushed and conventional fashion that undercuts the more interesting questions the film had raised about online complicity.