The internet has allowed us to succumb to many of man’s curiosities. Any type of pornography you can think of has a website. Want to see someone shoot themselves or throw themselves off of a building? Yes, the internet has that too. How do I personally know this? Well, as Martin Lawrence once stated in Nothing to Lose (1997), I’m a student of human nature. Remember a couple of months ago, a video exploded onto the internet called “2girls1cup”? It’s hard trying to find someone who hasn’t seen that video now. Point is, you can pretty much find whatever floats your boat, in some video form, on some obscure website if you search hard enough. So it was only a matter of time before some cinematic serial killer would figure out a way to capitalize on this amazingly available medium.

And that’s Gregory Hoblit’s Untraceable in a nut shell. Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) works the late night shift of the FBI’s Cyber Crimes Unit (that so sounds like a Law & Order spin-off). Her and her partner Griffin (Colin Hanks) spend their time scouring the internet for heathens and swine.

They make it seem so easy too. Moments after she arrives for her shift, she logs on to a website hosted by an internet thief of some sort, who immediately steals her personal information off of her computer. He then uses the credit card numbers from this computer to buy some sort of fancy watch just seconds later. Marsh calls the police department of whatever city this guy lives in and has him arrested immediately. Can justice work this fast? It almost feels like this movie was originally supposed to be a television show or something.

Marsh then stumbles upon a site - killwithme.com - where a little kitty is tortured to death. Now, it’s hard to say if this was the filmmaker’s intention or not, but this little scene in the film is the hardest to watch. All the other victim’s deaths feel tame compared to this, no matter how grotesque they are.

After the kitty bites it, the website host decides to bring in a human being. Then the site claims that the more people who visit the site, the faster the victim is killed, thus causing the actual visitors of the website to be the murderers. How far fetched of an idea is this?

There seems to be a high level of morality suggested here, as if this website (and its tactics) are some deep metaphor about the freedom of the internet or something. Human beings love to watch wretched videos online but it wasn’t the internet that started the rage. People have been obsessed with watching people die since before the middle ages. Some countries even have public executions still to this day. Perhaps if this film was trying to say something important, it should have taken place centuries ago.

Untraceable is scripted by a team of first-time screenwriters, with the assistance of one experienced scribe. The result feels like something they worked on in film school. It’s a tame version of Saw, aimed at middle-aged America, with the same lack of brains and appeal. There might be a reason that this premise of a website that kills hasn’t been seen much of outside Fear Dot Com (2002) - it’s just not as scary as it’s being painted and ends up being just as lame as it sounds.