Review by Leonard Norwitz
Studio:
Theatrical: Screen Gems & Lakeshore Entertainment
Blu-ray: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Disc:
Region: A
Runtime: 101 min
Chapters: 16
Size: 50 GB
Case: Locking Blu-ray case
Release date: May 13, 2008
Video:
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Resolution: 1080p
Video codec: AVC MPEG-4
Audio:
English or French Dolby True HD 5.1, Spanish and
Portuguese DD 5.1
Subtitles:
Feature: English, English SDH, French, Spanish,
Portuguese. Extras: English, Spanish, Portuguese,
none
Extras:
• Audio Commentary with Director Greg Hoblit,
Producer Hawk Koch, and Production Designer Paul
Eads.
• Behind-the-Scenes Featurettes:
• Tracking Untraceable (15 min.);
• Untraceable: The Personnel Files (15 Min.);
• The Blueprint of Murder (13 min.)
• The Anatomy of Murder (6 min.)
• Exclusive to Blu-ray: Bonus View [Profile 1.1]
Picture-in-Picture: Beyond the Cyber Bureau.
The Film:
The Movie : 6
Billed as a sort of Silence of the Lambs for
the Internet Age, Untraceable features Diane Lane as
FBI Cyber Bureau agent Jennifer Marsh. She and her
friend and colleague Griffen Dowd, played by Colin
Hanks, search the Internet for possible crime of all
sorts. She’s mostly interested in the nastier sort.
But years of experience is hardly enough to prepare
her for KillWithMe.com, a website where the more
people watch, the faster the victim dies. It’s not
that viewers want to see a quick death, but that
they want to see it on live-TV.
The killer begins his career slowly destroying a
cat, but quickly escalates to human victims,
apparently at random. He is evidently quite a wizard
in computer/Internet technology since he employs
some pretty sophisticated technology to prevent the
authorities from shutting him down. The puzzle as to
the identity of the killer and the connection
between the victims is cleverly worked out, but not
before members of the special FBI unit are
themselves captured to star on the website.
The filmmakers have a clear point of view about
Internet crime and sites such as KillWithMe.com in
particular: the viewers are not simply voyeurs (as
bad as that might be), they are accomplices, like
throwing gasoline on a fire. The killer himself has
the position which, though taken to psychopathic
extremes, has a point: that the government and the
FBI are accomplices as well since they protect the
rights of those who use television and the Internet
to exploit violence. It's a difficult line at times,
given the sort of liberal democracy we live in the
U.S. All the same, there will be many who feel that
this film indulges gruesome violence to such an
extent it sadistically panders to its stated
objection. Though this was not my feeling, I found
the film had other problems in the final act.
There are probably two reasons why Untraceable
would attract an audience: the first is the subject
matter, the second is its star, Diane Lane, who
played a Secret Service agent, some felt
not-so-credibly, in Murder at 1600. Ms Lane is now
11 years older and more experienced, and women are
seen as placing themselves in higher risk jobs than
ever before. Whatever we might have thought about
her in 1997, she is 105% believable today
in a similar role – that is, until the final act
when, at the behest of the screenplay, she makes the
fatal mistake of placing herself in harm’s way in
cliché fashion – as if she’s suddenly forgotten all
her training at the critical moment or never watched
a thriller.
Image : 9 (9/9)
The score of 9 indicates a relative level of
excellence compared to other Blu-ray DVDs. The score
in parentheses represents: first, a value on a
ten-point scale for the image in absolute terms;
and, second, how that image compares to what I
believe is the current best we can expect in the
theatre.
Untraceable might well have been photographed in
black & white. It has a desaturated quality whose
intent might be to give the viewer a little more
distant form the prolonged on-screen gruesomeness of
the murders. The image is high contrast has little
detail in the shadows, but is generally quite sharp
and in good focus throughout. Curiously, hair is not
well defined and remains coarse, as if upscaled from
lower resolution material, which is not the case.
Audio & Music : 9/8
The music by Christopher Young is very effective at
creating suspense and lurking terror, though it’s a
little overused, thus kind of defeating the purpose.
The clear and dynamic sound mix did particularly
well with atmospherics, especially rain.
Operations : 6
At first I found the menu operations vague and
sluggish. As it happened, during the course of this
review, I replaced my Sony S300 with a PS3 and from
then on, everything moved along nicely, though the
fonts remained darker than I would have liked when
the menu is accessed during the play of the feature
instead of prior to it. It is necessary for the disc
to reboot for BonusView, so the better loading speed
of the PS3 came in handy there as well.
Extras : 6
The Blu-ray Exclusive BonusView is essentially a
continuous picture-in-picture commentary, running
alongside the feature film. You could think of it as
all of the other bonus features, including the main
audio commentary rolled into one handy function.
Fleshing out the four making-of featurettes:
Tracking Untraceable (15 min.) is about how the
script came into being. A doctor says he wanted to
try his hand at something else. Untraceable: The
Personnel Files (15 min.) deals with casting, and is
more or less a deserved love song to Diane Lane. The
Blueprint of Murder (13 min.) details the production
design. The cleverly titled, Anatomy of Murder (6
min.) looks at makeup and special effects.
Bottom line:
Recommendation : 7
Untraceable is an effective thriller with a strong
socio/political point of view. It plays cat and
mouse with cliché, sometimes winning, sometimes
losing that game. Diane Lane might be the main
reason to see the film, but be warned: the effects
are gruesome and prolonged – as I think they should
be to make the intended political point.
Leonard Norwitz
May 8, 2008