Untraceable

To the accompaniment of an ominous soundtrack, an unseen figure prepares to broadcast, live to the internet, images of a trapped cat being slowly killed. To an equally ominous soundtrack, a figure whose face is concealed by a hoodie drives slowly through the rainy night, before parking and entering a building.

These paired opening sequences to Untraceable set the film firmly within the psycho thriller sub-genre wherein, from at least Se7en (1995) onwards, masked killers play out their games of demonic morality beneath a permanent drizzle of noir. What is more interesting, however, about Gregory Hoblit's film is that the second figure will almost immediately turn out to be not some crazed murderer, but Special Agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane), of the FBI's Portland cyber-crime division.

The ambiguous way in which she is introduced – and the suspicions which the film will manipulate us into harboring about each and every one of her colleagues – are not merely a reflection of the old cliché that cops and criminals are cut from the same cloth. Rather, Untraceable is a film that will try to expose our collective complicity in the crimes that it portrays. As her boss (Peter Lewis) will later put it, addressing all his fellow Americans in a dramatic television broadcast: "We are the murder weapon".

The killer in question, you see, is abducting seemingly random individuals, strapping them to machines of slow torture in a wired-up basement, and feeding live-stream video of their suffering onto an untraceable website called killwithme.com. And given that the machines are directly triggered by user numbers, the more people who enter the site to watch, the greater the victims' torment and the more likely their painful demise. Needless to say, once word of the site gets out, the corpses begin to mount – forcing guilt-ridden single mother Marsh herself to become more directly involved in the work she normally conducts through the relative distance of a computer screen. For not only is she, like everyone else, a party to the grisly crimes, but she might just find herself becoming a victim too.

No doubt at the dark heart of Untraceable lie some serious contemporary concerns with that peculiarly noxious blend of voyeurism, vicariousness and anonymity that the internet affords its users, so that, shielded by our very invisibility from any normal sense of responsibility, we can blithely watch, share and mock online acts of humiliation or worse.

So far, so good – but the problem is that Untraceable tries (and largely fails) to have it both ways. On the one hand it tries to deal with matters that are far too grave to be dished up as a thrilling genre entertainment (and a derivative, cliché-riddled one to boot), while on the other hand its final-act cat-and-mouse shenanigans are just too silly to take at all seriously.

Slick, bland and stupid do not sit comfortably with references to the all-too-real on-line execution of Daniel Pearl – and yet, unlike Brett Leonard's similar, superior Feed (2005), which revelled in its own sordid tawdriness and invited the viewer to join in the fun, Untraceable is a more po-faced affair, pretending to be above all the sensationalism and depravity that it exploits, as though Hoblit and co. are somehow themselves immune from their killer's obsession with viewing figures.

Untraceable is not all bad. The ever-reliable Diane Lane lends to her role both a gravitas and warmth that, in its underwritten state, it hardly seems to deserve. All the hackneyed police procedural and cloak-and-dagger material are at least enough to divert anyone stuck on a plane. And there can be no question that the underlying concepts have a disturbing edge to them.

As a chiller set in the wired world, it is certainly a cut above William Malone's FeardotCom (2002) or Dario Argento's risible The Card Player (2004), even if it never comes close to the cerebral heights of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse (2001) or Olivier Assayas' Demonlover (2002). Still, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Hoblit's film will soon only be 'traceable' in the dustiest back-section of your local videostore...