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Written by Ruari Burgham | Tuesday, March 18, 2008 |
‘Web Thriller’ is a genre of film that gives us terrible, terrible images. Images of films like ‘Hackers‘ and ‘The Net‘ and even the execrable ‘Johnny Mnemonic‘ are indelibly burned into our minds like a backdoor Trojan messing about with your hard-drive. Or something.
However, ‘Untraceable’, the latest film from the director of the really rather good ‘Hart’s War‘, seems to be trying to put something of a grand-guignol spin on it. In the weeks prior to the release of Untraceable, our innocent television sets were bombarded with flashing images of horrific acts of torture, and there was even a ‘Cloverfield‘ style viral website based on the films flash-based plot device.
This is all very nice, but does the film really live up to its 18-rated hype? Sadly, not quite. The film itself follows FBI agent Jennifer Marsh’s (played with some degree of flustered, panicky passion by Diane Lane) hunt for the psycho-killer whose website ‘Kill With Me’ is broadcasting live video feeds of grisly deaths to millions of people. The horrifying twist, however, is that the more people watch, the quicker the victim dies. The death scenes are suitably nasty, and the film itself has the requisite two or three real ‘look away’ moments, but as thrillers go, Hitchcock this ain’t.
The killer is made known to us almost straight away, thus eliminating any element of mystery or the possibility of a juicy little twist at the end. All we’re left with is a couple of hours of lots of running around ‘detecting’ with intermittent scenes of extreme sadism. Now, I know we all love a good, grisly bit of fun, but when an entire film is based solely around drawing you in with blood ‘n’ guts, are we really getting what we deserve?
However, this is not to say the film is not without it’s plus points-some good shock moments, some wonderful bleach-bypassed cinematography and more than a few very compelling performances (Colin Hanks‘ character Griffin actually manages to inject some humour into the sombre proceedings) make this film a lovely bit of forgettable, pre-pub fun, which shouldn’t make your pockets feel too picked.
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