Untraceable

Add another really dumb movie to the pile of dumb movies I’ve seen this year. This one is called Untraceable. It stars Diane Lane and it’s really dumb. The plot is dumb, the acting is dumb, the writing is dumb, the quote on the cover of the DVD box proclaiming it to be “the Silence of the Lambs of the internet age” is dumb, the guy who made the quote is a dumbass and deserves to be fired from his dumb job, and I’m dumb for having watched it.

Diane Lane plays an FBI computer forensic expert. She spends a lot of time busting 13 year-olds for pirating DVD’s and music. This movie is an 88-minute version of those anti-piracy commercials. There is a dumb scene where a kid gets busted for stealing credit card information from people who torrent his pirated media. He uses some sort of Backdoor Trojan approach that doesn’t involve a butthole and a condom. Hey all you stupid people who use torrent sites, don’t you know that all your personal information is getting ripped off just because you’re too cheap and lazy to buy the actual crappy DVD version of Beowulf that you are stealing or borrowing or whatever you call it? The FBI is watching you and people like Diane Lane and her retarded assistants will find you and fine your ass or put you in jail because we all know how much our jails need to be populated with pre-pubescent teenage boys.

The dumb plot of the movie (other than the anti-piracy part) involves a killer who kidnaps people and kills them using intricate devices like heat lamps and acid baths and heparin IV injections and posts video of them struggling and suffering and dying on the internet. The more people that log on to the site to watch the torture, the faster the victim dies. It’s all live, with people commenting on what they’re seeing, typing things like omg, lol, fry dude fry, this is teh suk, u pwnd him, etc. The website is called killwithme.com. The front page features an image of a skull wearing child-molester glasses. Kill With Me is written in red over a black background. Black + red = evil. You are an accomplice to the murder if you log on to the site just as you’re an accomplice to dumbness if you watch this movie. I thought the killer would turn out to be one of the FBI assistants but it wasn’t. I’m dumb. It was just some random kid with a retarded back-story that gave him motive.

Untraceable also attempts to address other complex issues such as what it’s like to be a single, working mother. Diane Lane’s character has a daughter who she constantly has to leave with her mother when the shit hits the fan. This happens a lot. Tons of shit. She has to read her daughter bedtime stories after long hours at work to make up for it. The shit inconveniently hits the fan during the daughter’s roller-rink birthday party and mother and daughter shoot Diane some discouraging looks when she leaves. I’d have bolted first chance I got cause that party looked lame. Roller-skating sucks. There’s also the issue of the single mother still getting over the death of her recently deceased husband while being attracted to a cop. No relationship develops. This is a red herring. The cop has small balls.

Watch for the awesome OnStar advertisement at the beginning of the movie. It’s so out of place that you know they’re going to use that product in some clever way later on in the movie. Thanks GM.

Untraceable makes Feardotcom look like The Net.

Updated to add: My friend posted a blog the other day about Morse Code and the effect it would have on certain popular songs. This movie uses Morse Code in a creative way as well. While one of the characters is being tortured, he's trying to communicate with the FBI by blinking out messages in Morse Code. One of the FBI dudes says something like, "I think his right eye is the dots and his left is the dashes." Amazing.