What we have so far is one dead cat and a man who may or may not be in danger.

Untraceable

(2008)

What a bunch of crap.

Diane Lane’s FBI agent must hunt a serial killer with a yen for posting his victims’ torture and murder on the Internet in real time. She is aided by several colleagues including Tom Hanks’ son and the psychopathic dad from Day 2 of 24 (the one who chases Kim, remember; then he shows up in Twilight as a nice dad – it’s all so confusing!). Cue multitudinous scenes of frantic tapping at keyboards, and dialogue/sequences that make it painfully clear the writers haven’t the faintest clue about plot logic, let alone FBI procedure. And, who would have guessed, lots of cuts to chatroom responses to the gruesome acts – LOL!

The movie Untraceable brought to mind was another tedious, hack -ob serial killer picture with no redeeming qualities; The Bone Collector. The cobbled-together script has zero interest in character, motivation, plot development, detective work, suspense; neither movie ever once summons up a glimmer of conviction to displace the awareness that this is uninspired, uninventive dross.

What we do get is a reheated plot resembling a decade-old episode of Millennium but with added torture-porn violence. The “watch murder on the internet” premise is so derivative, I’m surprised any exec was willing to say yes to purchasing the scrip, let alone usher the thing into production. Then again, this comes from Sony’s Screen Gems label, not exactly known for its innovative genre fare. It should come as little surprise that neither of the original co-writers has been credited on a movie since.

I like Diane Lane. Not only is she a decent actress, she’s also very pretty. Hopefully she’ll be sensible enough to age gracefully rather than succumb to the itch to mess up her face. Lane never quite made it into the ranks of fully-fledged movie star (the closest she came was probably Adrian “steamy” Lyne’s 2002 adultery flick Unfaithful), having got her break in a trio of ‘80s Coppola pictures. Many will probably remember her best for playing Judge Hershey in the Stallone Judge Dredd, so it seems fitting that playing Superman’s adopted mum in Man of Steel should eclipse that (it’s surprising that Lane and Costner have never played a couple onscreen before; they just seem like they should have done).

Anyway, I digress. Appropriately enough as Untraceable deserves exactly that level of commitment. Lane’s support comes from Colin Hanks, who plays the nerdy Colin Hanks type. His career involvement with serial killers only marginally improves later, as he appears in the weakest season of Dexter as one. I’m still always surprised whenever Billy Burke plays a good guy (I’m frankly perplexed that he is the lead in TV series Revolution) as he has the perfect face for villainy. All three leads are perfectly competent but done absolutely no favours by a script that, as I have noted, isn’t.

Presiding over this shambles is Gregory Hoblit, who once seemed to have a promising career ahead of him in the twisty thriller genre. He’s an above average journeyman director, and his first three films (Primal Fear, Fallen and Frequency) all had points in their favour; not least in a director with a firm grasp of how to elicit the required tension from a scene. The 2000s were less kind to him. Hart’s War and Fracture are patchy at best, but even they didn’t forewarn this disaster. Perhaps he realised how badly it stank and all motivation deserted him. No one could have made this even borderline palatable, but it would be a shame if a helmer more competent than many who are getting regular gigs is consigned to director hell.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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