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.

Comments

We live in a twilight world.

Tenet (2020)
(SPOILERS) I’ve endured a fair few confusingly-executed action sequences in movies – more than enough, actually – but I don’t think I’ve previously had the odd experience of being on the edge of my seat during one while simultaneously failing to understand its objectives and how those objectives are being attempted. Which happened a few times during Tenet. If I stroll over to the Wiki page and read the plot synopsis, it is fairly explicable (fairly) but as a first dive into this Christopher Nolan film, I frequently found it, if not impenetrable, then most definitely opaque.

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

You can’t climb a ladder, no. But you can skip like a goat into a bar.

Juno and the Paycock (1930)
(SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s second sound feature. Such was the lustre of this technological advance that a wordy play was picked. By Sean O’Casey, upon whom Hitchcock based the prophet of doom at the end of The Birds. Juno and the Paycock, set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, begins as a broad comedy of domestic manners, but by the end has descended into full-blown Greek (or Catholic) tragedy. As such, it’s an uneven but still watchable affair, even if Hitch does nothing to disguise its stage origins.

Anything can happen in Little Storping. Anything at all.

The Avengers 2.22: Murdersville
Brian Clemens' witty take on village life gone bad is one of the highlights of the fifth season. Inspired by Bad Day at Black Rock, one wonders how much Murdersville's premise of unsettling impulses lurking beneath an idyllic surface were set to influence both Straw Dogs and The Wicker Mana few years later (one could also suggest it premeditates the brand of backwoods horrors soon to be found in American cinema from the likes of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper).

James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.

Moonraker (1979)
Depending upon your disposition, and quite possibly age, Moonraker is either the Bond film that finally jumped the shark or the one that is most gloriously redolent of Roger Moore’s knowing take on the character. Many Bond aficionados will no doubt utter its name with thinly disguised contempt, just as they will extol with gravity how Timothy Dalton represented a masterful return to the core values of the series. If you regard For Your Eyes Only as a refreshing return to basics after the excesses of the previous two entries, and particularly the space opera grandstanding of this one, it’s probably fair to say you don’t much like Roger Moore’s take on Bond.

Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet.

Bugsy (1991)
(SPOILERS) Bugsy is very much a Warren Beatty vanity project (aren’t they all, even the ones that don’t seem that way on the surface?), to the extent of his playing a title character a decade and a half younger than him. As such, it makes sense that producer Warren’s choice of director wouldn’t be inclined to overshadow star Warren, but the effect is to end up with a movie that, for all its considerable merits (including a script from James Toback chock full of incident), never really feels quite focussed, that it’s destined to lead anywhere, even if we know where it’s going.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

I mean, I am just a dumb bunny, but, we are good at multiplying.

Zootropolis (2016)
(SPOILERS) The key to Zootropolis’ creative success isn’t so much the conceit of its much-vaunted allegory regarding prejudice and equality, or – conversely – the fun to be had riffing on animal stereotypes (simultaneously clever and obvious), or even the appealing central duo voiced by Ginnifier Goodwin (as first rabbit cop Judy Hopps) and Jason Bateman (fox hustler Nick Wilde). Rather, it’s coming armed with that rarity for an animation; a well-sustained plot that doesn’t devolve into overblown set pieces or rest on the easy laurels of musical numbers and montages.

When I barked, I was enormous.

Dean Spanley (2008)
(SPOILERS) There is such a profusion of average, respectable – but immaculately made – British period drama held up for instant adulation, it’s hardly surprising that, when something truly worthy of acclaim comes along, it should be singularly ignored. To be fair, Dean Spanleywas well liked by critics upon its release, but its subsequent impact has proved disappointingly slight. Based on Lord Dunsany’s 1939 novella, My Talks with Dean Spanley, our narrator relates how the titular Dean’s imbibification of a moderate quantity of Imperial Tokay (“too syrupy”, is the conclusion reached by both members of the Fisk family regarding this Hungarian wine) precludes his recollection of a past life as a dog.

Inevitably, reviews pounced on the chance to reference Dean Spanley as a literal shaggy dog story, so I shall get that out of the way now. While the phrase is more than fitting, it serves to underrepresent how affecting the picture is when it has cause to be, as does any re…

Doctor, eh? You’re not in the best of shape yourself, though, are you?

Doctor Who Season 26 – Worst to Best
I’m not a big Seventh Doctor fan. For me, Doctor Who pretty much ended with Season 23 (and not because it was awful: see here). Yes, there have been a few nu-Who reprieves (mostly notably Matt Smith’s first season), but the McCoy era flaunted an abundance of sins, from a lead who wasn’t up to snuff, to a script-editor messaging his social conscience wrapped in a breeze block (or bilge bag), to production values that made any given earlier era look absurdly lavish in comparison. And then there was the “masterplan” (which at least lends Season 24 a rather innocuous and relatively inoffensive quality by contrast).

Nevertheless, on the occasions I do return to the era, I’m always minded to give it a fair shake. And while that resolve inevitably crumbles within minutes, under the duress of cold harsh reality, it has, at times, led to a positive reappraisal (The Happiness Patrol, and, to an extent, perhaps unfathomably, Time and the Rani). So we’ll see ho…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog