This obnoxious little serial-killer epic features Diane Lane and Colin Hanks (Tom's son) as FBI agents trying to find a creep who's trained a Webcam on people he's torturing. Media reports fuel a frenzy — and the more hits the creep gets on his Web site, the quicker the acid drips, or the hotter the heat lamps burn.
We're meant to be as appalled as the FBI agents are at the public's appetite for sadism, while simultaneously feeling implicated for having attended a movie that exploits that appetite with wide-screen images of blistering skin and dissolving flesh.
That sounds double-edged, but it isn't really; despite reasonably taut direction from Gregory Hoblit, Untraceable registers as little more than standard-issue torture porn – Saw 17 with a classier cast.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
