A serial killer in the internet age allows his victims to be killed via audience participation, the bigger the audience the faster the demise of the victim. A FBI cybercrimes agent has to track our elusive killer down when it gets personal, but can she find him in time to prevent further deaths?
Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) is working in the FBI’s cybercrimes division with her associate Griffin Down (Colin Hanks). A new website pops up called www.killwithme.com, which is brought to their attention by an anonymous tip.
The first victim is a kitten who is slowly starved to death as the internet audience watches. The agents are appalled, but the way the signal is routed it makes the location of the crime virtually untraceable since it would require international search warrants.
The next victim is more surprising as it is a person that the killer has kidnapped a man. He ties the victim’s time of death to the website’s hits and the more hits the site gets them faster the person suffers their fate.
Marsh is trying hard to track down the killer, but when things get personal she has to find out his identity before she becomes the next victim on his site.
Untraceable is a decent serial killer romp with the added novelty of the killer using the internet audience as an accomplice in his crimes. In some way this makes the lookie-loos of the internet responsible for the deaths that take place in the movie. There’s some sort of social commentary there, but it’s wrapped in a pretty intense action romp so it may be lost.
There are a few plot points that hail from other serial killer movies. I especially thought of Silence of the Lambs when you think that they’ve figured out where the killer’s lair is. The deaths were particularly gruesome since they’re slow ones allowing the victim’s to suffer, all under the watchful eye of the killer’s webcam.
The one with the heat lambs I thought was really nasty, not that the battery acid one was a waltz through the park.
Diane Lane does well as the main character, but I thought that her “badge baring” at the end was a little protracted and tried to bash the movie’s point over our head a bit too much. It was a good little thriller, but I’m not sure that I saw anything that made it stand out too far above what has been on screens before.
Untraceable is presented in 1080p anamorphic widescreen (2.40:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Special features include a commentary with director Gregory Hoblit, producer Hawk Koch, and production designer Paul Eads. The 15 minute “Tracking Untraceable” is a standard making of and is the only featurette presented in high-def.
The 15 minute “Personnel Files” goes into the casting, the 13 minute “Blueprint of Murder” looks at creating the killer’s lair, and the 5 minute “Anatomy of a Murder” looks at recreating the onscreen deaths. There are also some previews. Now we get to the Blu-ray exclusive section and I have to sigh a bit.
It’s called “Beyond the Cyberbureau” and promises a picture-in-picture interviews, storyboards, and a selection of bonus material. When I select this feature on my Sony BDP-S300 player I get “Your Player doesn’t Support this Feature.”
The irony that I’m trying to play a Sony Blu-ray on a Sony player and it doesn’t work is not lost on me, but this conundrum rears the ugly head of the profiling issue. Racial, you say? Nope, the ever changing Blu-ray profile.
Profile 1.0 was the beginning (until November 2007), then it was mandated that players be made to 1.1 specs (aka BonusView) and there’s even a 2.0 (aka BD-Live) and a 3.0 profile upcoming. What this means is that if you have a player made before November 2007 then you’re out of luck if you want a picture-in-picture commentary since it wasn’t supported till 1.1.
Sadly, I learn of all this after I bought a set top player. I told one of my buddies about this and he said no sweat since firmware updates would take care of all that. Au contraire monsieur buddy since 1.1 has some hardware requirements that a 1.0 player will not have so no amount of software updates is going to make it work.
The PS3 is pretty immune to these profiling issues since its chips are pretty high tech, but if you got in on the lower end of settop players then its pretty caveat emptor. My emails to Sony have been pretty fruitless.
The response was basically “The Blu-ray Disc player supports BD-ROM Profile 1 only. Playback of later versions and BDs other than BD-ROMs is not guaranteed. Since the Blu-ray Disc specifications are new and evolving, some discs may not play depending on the disc type and the version.”
There’s even fine print on the back of the case that states as much, but once you’re removed the shrink-wrap from the case you own the disc. As I hear about some of the grand gestures to HD DVD adopters ($50 gift cards from some retailers to those that bought the players), but I wonder if this issue will get the same attention?
I suppose it’s only the one special feature that wouldn’t play, but I’m not really happy that I’ve got a disc (more than one, wait for my National Treasure 2 Blu-ray review) that is not truly “fully” functional. Such as it is as our entertainment devices moves towards being little computers.
Technical difficulties aside, Untraceable was a decent serial killer thriller but nothing that makes it rise about the rest. Those technical difficulties made some of Untraceable unplayable [insert rimshot here], but I still thought the movie was pretty suspenseful but never suspected that I’d be in suspense as to whether parts of the disc are going to work.
Untraceable [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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