Untraceable
Diane Lane has been acting in movies since she was a teenager, but she didn’t become an above-the-title star until her late 30s. Now, this gorgeous and uncommonly talented actress is 43 – too old for a leading lady by Hollywood standards – and the roles are drying up already. While her husband, Josh Brolin, enjoys a career renaissance because age has added definition to his callow good looks, Lane is reduced to starring in dreck like “Untraceable,” in which she plays a widowed FBI agent with zero romantic life. Lane is wonderful in the fleeting moments when the movie acknowledges her character’s humanity, but mostly “Untraceable” is an uninspired and revolting torture procedural that rips off “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Saw” in equal parts. From “Lambs” it gets the super-competent female FBI agent hunting a demented serial killer, while the moral hypocrisy comes from “Saw.” It pretends to be aghast at the depravity that people will watch on the Internet while taking for granted that the audience will be riveted by said depravity. I wanted to look away – partly out of disgust but mostly out of boredom. “Untraceable,” directed by Gregory Hoblit, has no finesse or structural integrity – the killer’s identity and motivation are introduced lazily and arbitrarily. I do give credit to the location scouts. The movie is set in Portland, Oregon, and, remarkably, it was shot there and not in Vancouver. You get an honest feel for the place, a sense of specificity that many movies lack – and not just bad ones.
LISTEN: Untraceable