Parents' Guide to Untraceable

Even if you take the film's moral lesson at face value, the overkill is discouraging, and not very instructive. With Marsh at the center of the action, there's a lot of focus on Lane's performance. She's certainly up to it -- particularly as Marsh's personal relationships are put at risk, and she becomes increasingly vulnerable in conversations with friends and family -- but the film depends on repetitive reaction shots as she and others gaze on grisly scenes, with viewers invited to gaze along with them. The movie essentially implicates its own audience in the commercialization and mass mediation of violence.

In fact, by the time the killer articulates his outrage against easy access to violent images, the rest of us have long since figured out that his strategy is faulty. He's trying to teach users that watching the abuse and murder of people they don't know is wrong and cruel -- but his own means are excessively cruel and don't teach anyone anything. Instead, the viewers he invites to his Web site -- where victims are set up in diabolical contraptions that increase their suffering as more users log on -- are just made culpable in the abuse.