Tagline: “In the FBI’s cyber-crime division, they can catch any criminal with the touch of a button.”
Translation: The FBI’s cyber-crime division was definitely not consulted during the making of this film.
The Verdict: Unlike 1995’s The Net starring Sandra Bullock, which played on understandable fears of emerging technology and seemed perfectly reasonable until early 1996 or so, Untraceable is side-splittingly hilarious now, and it doesn’t even come out for another three weeks! In it, Diane Lane and Colin Hanks play FBI agents on the trail of a killer who streams his murders live on the Internet (in high-quality HD video that will likely not be possible for at least another five years). His victims are bound, gagged, and hooked up to a machine that pumps them full of more poison as the killer’s Website’s traffic increases. Complicating things is the fact that the site is … untraceable! (“It’s like no Website we’ve ever seen!” exclaims Lane.) If this guy is such a genius hacker, we’re not sure why he’s still measuring his traffic in “hits,” as page views replaced hits years ago, and a real geek would probably use “time spent” or inbound links as a metric now, right? It gets scarier later when the killer is somehow able to hack into Lane’s wireless network (tell us she didn’t use a 64-bit WEP key!), which, we’d like to point out, can be accomplished with a simple piece of shareware. We bet this screenplay was written on a 486.
