Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn't impervious to the
sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there's I Watched This
On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking
yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of
a real reward. And a good time.
Cultural infamy: Untraceable really brought nothing to
the culture, other than adding to the slushpile of Se7en/Saw rip-offs—albeit
with a cyber-age twist, which puts it in the distinguished company of movies
like Virtuosity
and Dee Snider's StrangeLand. (Or as I call the latter, Dee Snider's
SearingGasPainLand.)
It opened to middling business and mostly unkind reviews (34 Metacritic score,
15 percent Tomatometer rating), with critics lashing the film as "a repugnant
example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn" (Stephen Holden, The New
York Times)
and "dressing up sadism in a moral message that condemns the very weakness it is
exploiting." (Richard Corliss, Time) Our own Keith Phipps called it "that
rare movie that agrees with the killer." So reaction ran the gamut from
disgusted to appalled to revolted to aghast.
Curiosity factor: Stratospheric. There are
two very specific types of movies that always pique my interest: Movies about
underdogs conquering Wall Street (I've seen The Secret Of My Success a dozen times or more,
and I hate
that movie) and alarmist movies about the evils of the computer age. The more
clueless and hysterical they are, the better: Remember The Net, when Sandra Bullock was
made to seem like a freakish shut-in for ordering goods and services off the Web?
How about Dee Snider's SearingGasPainLand, which made the very act of turning on a
computer seem akin to jamming your tongue into an electric socket? Or the
"virtual reality" duel between pasted-on Photoshop versions of Michael Douglas
and Demi Moore in Disclosure? The passing of time only adds to the fun, not
just because technology looks that much more hilariously dated, but also
because you can see what the crotchety, sky-is-falling, Andy Rooney-types were
up in arms about a decade or so ago. Could Untraceable be the next FearDotCom? Or would it be LameDotNet?
The viewing experience: Instant deflation. Any
movie that opens with an adorable kitten getting tortured and killed faces a
steep uphill climb to get back into my good graces. Right off the bat, Untraceable announces itself as an
ugly movie—not the silly escapist technophobic romp that some viewers
(okay, this
viewer) might crave, but something grim, scolding, and prudishly sadistic. It
aims to titillate us with webcam voyeurism and Saw-like homemade killing
machines, then call us a bunch of sickos for getting off on it. "Are you
enjoying yourselves?", the filmmakers seem to be asking. "Well then, J'accuse
America! This is the movie you sick fucks deserve!"
For my purposes, the main problem with Untraceable is that it's more a serial-killer
movie than a technology movie, though obviously the two aspects are intertwined.
The gimmick here is a doozy: The killer in question runs a website called
killwithme.com. He straps his victims to various apparatuses, sets up a webcam,
and kills them at a rate that corresponds to how many users are logging on at
any given time. The higher the number of page views, the more accelerated the
rate at which, say, the hydrochloric acid will be dispensed. (I believe this is
analogous to how Gawker Media currently pays its writers.) So even though he's
abducted the victims, jerry-rigged elaborate torture-and-killing machines, and
presumably promoted his site on various message boards and e-mail blasts, it's
really YOU, random Internet person, who's responsible for all these deaths. Or,
as one of the FBI honchos says at a press conference, "Any American who visits
this site is an accomplice to murder!"
(Side note: If more page views mean an accelerated
murder rate, wouldn't logging onto the site serve as a relief to a victim who's
going to die anyway? I know if I were sitting in a tank of water with
hydrochloric acid seeping in through a jet—Holiday Inn calls it a
"whirlpool"—I'd be begging for killwithme.com to be a viral sensation,
because I'd want the flesh to peel off my bones as quickly as possible.)
Anyway, it's up to Diane Lane, a cyber-cop with
the Federal Cyber Crimes Task Force, to do whatever cyber-stuff is necessary to
track this twisted moralist down. And here is where Untraceable presumably starts to pay
techno-babble dividends, as we learn about the "backdoor Trojans," mirror
sites, and "rolling IP's" that would leave casual web surfers scratching their
heads like lice-infested primates. In this scene, Lane and her nerdy colleague
(Colin Hanks, son of Tom) explain to the boss why killwithme.com can't just be
turned off, and why it's going to be so difficult to track its webmaster down:
Sounds convincing enough to me, but then, I'm
neither cyber-cop nor cyber-criminal. So I asked The A.V. Club's web producer, Paul
Reda, to help sort out all this mumbo-jumbo. Should potential techno-savvy
copycat killers be taking notes? Here's what he had to say:
Implausible though his methods may be, the killer
remains extremely elusive—some might say… well, you know the
title—which mostly takes the film out of the technological realm and into
the realm of a generic serial-killer movie. (Though you do get to learn some
texting shorthand: HHOS means "ha ha only serious," TYFAYS means "thank you for
all your support," and MTC means "more to come." TYVM, Diane Lane, for
interpreting them for me.) As such, Untraceable offers a handful of
unintentional laughs, including one of the clumsiest examples of foreshadowing
I can remember: When Hanks watches the first victim bite the dust, he says,
"Too bad this guy wasn't a Boy Scout. He could just blink in Morse Code and
tell us where he is." Gee, what an odd thing to say. Too bad the guy wasn't
Jean-Dominique Bauby, either—he could have dictated his memoir while
getting boiled alive by heat lamps!
I'm also disappointed Untraceable wasn't a whodunit,
either, because I was certain that Beardy, an otherwise totally superfluous
cyber-division lackey, would be the killer, or at least a red herring. Just look
at how shifty he is:
In the end, Untraceable is a dim, risible
enterprise, sleazily embodying the things it's pretending to condemn. Like a
lot of cautionary tales about technology, it has a silly "You kids get off my
lawn!" quality, but it would be easier to laugh it off if it didn't feature
things like cat torture for our supposed edification. If you want a quick
window into the film's ethos, I'd encourage you to visit its official website, killwithme.com. Presented
with the same interface as site visitors in the movie, you're given a final out
after pressing "Enter": "Warning: Visiting this site could cause harm to
innocent people. Do you still want to enter?" Being the morally upstanding
type, I naturally said "No," which leads to a screen that says, "11% of you
heeded the warning. Thankfully some of you have morals."
I have morals. Therefore, I hated Untraceable. The other 89% of you can
rot.
How much of the experience wasn't a total waste
of time?: About
eight minutes or so. The clip explaining the killer's technical wizardry is
just the sort of abstract-sounding gobbledygook that keeps bringing me back to
the cyber-thriller, despite the Paul Reda buzzkill. And the following clip, in
which Lane's OnStar system betrays her, is about as raw an expression of
irrational techno-phobia as you'll ever see.