If Oprah ran a movie club and Untraceable managed to find its way onto her list, she would find herself embroiled in yet another scandal. Untraceable is a crime thriller that pillages the Hollywood storehouse, plagiarizing far better films than itself, and cutting and pasting entire scenes until something resembling a new movie remains.

Untraceable, directed by the competent but uninspired Gregory Hoblit, follows Portland-based FBI Cyber Crimes agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) as she discovers an “untraceable” Web site run by a serial killer who murders his victims live. The more people who log on to the site to watch, the faster and more barbarically his victims die. As Marsh and her team race to uncover the Webmaster’s identity, whereabouts and motive, they find themselves trapped in their own deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the killer.

Untraceable is stocked with the usual suspects — the single-mom cop who is having difficultly balancing duty and family, the boss (Peter Lewis) without a clue, the slightly nerdy but enduring sidekick (Colin Hanks), and the warped villain (Joseph Cross) who cannot decide whether he is trying to settle an old score or ride the wave of his 15 minutes of Warholian fame. For his part, Cross, known best for his quirky comedies, parleys his innate spookiness to unnerving effect.

Lane delivers, as always, but she is written as someone who has no more brains than the single, blond, buxom teen in the horror film who, upon hearing footsteps in her attic late one dark and stormy night, goes upstairs in her lingerie to investigate.

It’s unfortunate that what begins as a moderately engaging techno-thriller about the often-ignored dangers of the Internet degrades into a completely generic serial killer movie. While the film, like its antagonist, knows that curiosity and a natural morbid interest can turn idle viewers into willing accomplices to murder, Untraceable doesn’t address any of the moral questions it raises. Instead of a thought-provoking glimpse at the untapped potential and power of the Internet, the film is more interested in macabre voyeurism and the public’s voracious appetite for sensationalism — the very thing it pretends to deplore.

Not bold enough to embrace the sort of torture porn that the Saw franchise has popularized, and not adept enough to resemble an edgy and stylistic thriller like Silence of the Lambs or Seven, Untraceable, which ends on a completely unsatisfying and false note, is nothing more than a run of the mill, paint by numbers, suspense thriller undeserving of your mental bandwidth.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.