BOTTOM LINE: Formulaic thriller that destroys an interesting plot by meandering through cliché after cliché at a pedestrian pace without ever generating any suspense.

THE GOOD: The concept is great. A sadistic serial killer begins broadcasting his grisly work to the world via his untraceable website killforme.com. After trapping his victims, he straps them into some very inventive and frightening death contraptions and then starts live streaming on the web. Ingeniously all his death machines are only designed to kill the victim as the website traffic increases. The more hits the site receives, the faster and more horribly the victim will die at the hands of the internet’s seemingly unlimited voyueristic audience. In a macabre twist this only attracts more viewers and raises some very interesting moral questions about exploitation sites on the internet. Diane Lane as FBI Cybercrime agent Jennifer Marsh plays her role perfectly, balancing Marsh’s professional demanour with a nicely human touch. Its just unfortunate that the script is so poor her performance can’t save the film. Likewise her supporting cast Billy Burke, Colin Hanks and Joseph Cross all put in decent efforts, but they too suffer at the hands of a script that never gives any of its characters a chance to shine.

THE BAD: The problem with a manufactured script is that it will start with a good idea and then systematically destroy it by trying too hard. In this case, instead of us watching a film about FBI Agent Jennifer Marsh on the trail of a serial killer, we’re watching a a film that tries to generate its suspense by checking all the cliché boxes. The characters are all completely contrived and their motivations are purely script based, making them one dimensional and unbelievable. In fact not only does the lip-reading agent (never actually introduced but appearing in several scenes), have no reason to be in the film, the same could be said about the entire supporting cast. Detective Box who must get 40 minutes of screen time seems to to fulfil no purpose except to offer a single obscure idea that somehow explains the serial killer’s unconvincing MO. Likewise Agent Griffen Dowd who works closely alongside Jennifer never actually participates in solving the crime except to exclude himself from suspicion when he falls victim to the killer. Could the killer be one of Jennifer’s colleagues? Will the killer go for one of Jennifer’s family? Who’s going to be next? Who cares? This film packs no punches, no shocks and no surprises - my advice is to give it a miss. There is only one Silence of the Lambs, get it on DVD and watch it again. You’ll enjoy it far more than Untraceable no matter how many times you’ve already seen it.