Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Untraceable (2008)

This is topic Untraceable (2008) in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 01-26-2008, 10:23 PM:

Today 5:05PM, Regal 15 in Eugene, #5, 35mm. Print was scratched from beginning to end (horizontal scratches down the center of the image). The digital sound dropped out at the start of reel 4 and there was a "sync beep". Didn't appear to be a bad splice job. Reel 3 has a fade to black at the end, followed by a couple seconds more action, then the reel change. If someone wasn't paying close attention they might mis-ID the splice. Maybe the lab eff'd up the sound there too.

The movie is a pretty good thriller, not great, but good. For once most of the computer jargon in a movie rings fairly true. Diane Lane is good, didn't really recognize anyone else. I wouldn't highly recommend this but it didn't suck. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Q: You manage a 15-plex that has six box office stations. It's the busiest night of the week for you. There's a long line of people waiting to buy tickets and obviously some potential customers are turning around and leaving when they see the long line. How many box office stations do you open?

A: Apparently four.

Posted by Dennis Benjamin (Member # 1137) on 01-27-2008, 07:52 PM:

Cue the music...

"That's Entertainment, Regal Entertainment to be exact".

Just an FYI - since the company is micro-managed, that's all the GM probably had to work with - according to his payroll budget.

[Big Grin]

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 01-27-2008, 08:00 PM:

There's something seriously wrong when a business is unprepared to collect the money from everyone trying to give the business their money.

Posted by Kyle Anderson (Member # 3504) on 01-27-2008, 10:51 PM:

quote: David Stambaugh
Q: You manage a 15-plex that has six box office stations. It's the busiest night of the week for you. There's a long line of people waiting to buy tickets and obviously some potential customers are turning around and leaving when they see the long line. How many box office stations do you open?

A: Apparently four.

The correct answer:
A: you're not even out on the floor to see that there's a huge line, and you've never trained any of your "staff" (read: minimum wage retards) to have an awareness of customer service, so they wouldn't know to come tell you about it. [Frown]

SEMI SPOILER

*****
At the end, she should have given camera the finger... !!!!
*****

Posted by Stu Jamieson (Member # 4626) on 04-26-2008, 06:34 PM:

The mainstay of maverick film makers like Eli Roth, Takashi Miike and Alexandre Aja, torture porn is now getting the Hollywood treatment. The trouble is, Hollywood doesn't have the stomach for the genre and the result is akin to Frank Bennett's cover of Radiohead's Creep: the words and the tune are there, and it's undeniably entertaining, but it's missing the rawness of the genuine article. It's too clean, too nice, too civilised to be truly unsettling. It doesn't look or feel dangerous like SAW or Hostel, films the like of which Untraceable clearly takes its influence. It's just a bit, well, gutless.

The plot concerns an unstable young chap (Joseph Cross) who creates a website called www.killwithme.com (yes, it is a real site - click the link, it works), a webcam site where he submits unfortunate individuals to SAW-style traps with the gimmick that the greater the number of surfers who log onto his site, the faster the demise of his victim. Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) and Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) are FBI agents assigned to snare the unhinged antagonist.

Given the technological nature of the premise, technical feasibility was always going to be a sticking point with this film and boffin cynics will find plenty to snigger and scoff at here. Also there are several glaring flaws in logic which are difficult to overlook and by the end of the film you'll be wondering how the Feds didn't put the pieces together much, much sooner.

The film is essentially a social comment on the publics' insatiable appetite for the grotesque and the ease at which the internet dishes it up. This is certainly a valid topic worthy of serious discussion though here it is merely presented for the purposes of entertainment. Nevertheless, despite its numerous shortcomings, the film does succeed in being fundamentally entertaining and there are much worse thriller/horror flicks around at the moment, vis-a-vis Prom Night.

6.5 out of 10