Review of Untraceable (2008) by James S — 28 Apr 2009

Untraceable must win some kind of award for being a thriller which is not thrilling in the slightest. It's like a bad episode of Silent Witness.

A snuff website is killing folk off using a couple of novel techniques and the more people log on to the site the quicker the victim dies, while the police race against time and technology to stop the culprit. It's a nice riff on some of the ideas presented by the Saw movies and although a couple of the death scenes are inventive, this is undermined by the plinky plonky synthesiser music which seems to play in the background of every scene while the cops who have no chemistry with each other stumble around being quite blindingly stupid.

I'm sure the creators of Untraceable were hoping to make a Silence of the Lambs style thriller, one which courted the controversial issue of internet consumption and man's uncompassionate attitude towards their fellow human beings.

As it stands it's a dull, lifeless and predictable thriller with very little exciting happening. Not scary or thrilling, this is a novel idea which has been wasted with a mediocre packaging.