ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ

Diane Lane does away with glam in Untraceable. She tosses back her unkempt locks and crawls into the darkest, dingiest corners of cyberspace to find a killer who invites surfers to log on and participate. Even in this bedraggled state, she lends a touch of class to an otherwise tacky thriller by Gregory Hoblit. Still, that's not enough to distract from a plot which, despite a hi-tech premise, feels as if it's been patched together using 'auto-fill' screenwriting software.

Pulling the night shift at the FBI means Jennifer has little time to spend with her daughter, and when she discovers a website featuring a kitten being put down live on air, the job becomes an obsession. Soon there are human victims in the frame and the homicidal geek (Joseph Cross playing it like Doogie Howser gone rogue) ups the entertainment value by intensifying the torture according to the number of hits to the site. He also takes pride in finding new and unusual methods of execution. Have you ever seen a man cooked alive by heat lamps?

"NUMBING AND REPETITIVE"

Jennifer spills over with moral outrage at the twisted voyeurism of Joe Public, but it's impossible to reconcile that with Hoblit's loving close-ups of skin bubbling and blistering like a TV ad for all-you-can-eat pizza. Whatever criticism he pretends to make about our happy-slapping, YouTube culture is undermined with every new victim. As the punishment becomes more cruel and convoluted, the more numbing and repetitive it feels. Watching the film is rather like having your eyes gouged out with a spoon and then being left in the dark to wonder why. Colin Hanks brings a smidgen of light relief as Jennifer's techno-savvy sidekick, but then Hoblit tips the scale too far on the side of ludicrous when he's required to blink for help in Morse code. Sadly, however hard you look, there isn't a shred of credibility to be found.

Untraceable is out in the UK on 29th February 2008.