CNET Networks Entertainment GameSpot | GameFAQs | SportsGamer | Metacritic | MP3.com | TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games Books TV
Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Film

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 

Wide Releases

sort by name sort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 

Limited Releases

sort by name sort by score

97 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
83 Alexandra
43 Anamorph
35 Babysitters, The
32 Backseat
80 Band's Visit, The
62 Battle for Haditha
47 Bella
63 Blind Mountain
71 Blindsight
47 Boarding Gate
63 Body of War
58 Bra Boys
70 Caramel
54 Cashback
44 Chaos Theory
32 Chapter 27
69 Chicago 10
82 Chop Shop
46 CJ7
78 Counterfeiters, The
30 Cover
48 Dark Matter
35 Deal
61 Dhamma Brothers, The
92 Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The
73 Duchess of Langeais, The
20 Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
58 Fall, The
43 Favor, The
58 First Saturday in May, The
57 Flawless
87 Flight of the Red Balloon, The
xx From Within
44 Frontier(s)
59 Fugitive Pieces
41 Funny Games
66 George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
61 Girls Rock!
55 Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
57 Grand, The
58 Hats Off
68 Honeydripper
xx Jack and Jill vs. the World
67 Jellyfish
xx Kiss the Bride
37 Life Before Her Eyes, The
72 Life of Reilly, The
50 Look
65 Married Life
35 Meet Bill
63 Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
54 Mister Lonely
52 My Blueberry Nights
71 My Brother Is an Only Child
52 Noise
61 OSS 117: Cairo - Nest of Spies
83 Paranoid Park
55 Pathology
48 Penelope
90 Persepolis
62 Planet B-Boy
xx Plumm Summer, A
67 Praying with Lior
46 Previous Engagement, A
72 Priceless
17 Prom Night
69 Redbelt
72 Roman de gare
48 Run, Fat Boy, Run
85 Savages, The
24 Sex and Death 101
66 Shelter
75 Shotgun Stories
40 Sleepwalking
67 Snow Angels
64 Son of Rambow
71 Standard Operating Procedure
76 Stuff and Dough
64 Surfwise
xx Tashan
82 Taxi to the Dark Side
57 Teeth
56 Then She Found Me
55 Tracey Fragments, The
56 Turn the River
72 Tuya's Marriage
83 U2 3D
59 Under the Same Moon
76 Unforeseen, The
xx Unsettled
91 Up the Yangtze
55 Vice
79 Visitor, The
64 Water Lilies
45 Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
57 Without the King
74 Witnesses, The
63 XXY
67 Year My Parents Went on Vacation, The
75 Young@Heart
45 Zombie Strippers

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.



Untraceable
Screen Gems (Sony)

Untraceable reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 32 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
5.3 out of 10
based on 30 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 23 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: R for grisly violence and torture, and some language

Starring Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks, Joseph Cross, and Mary Beth Hurt

Within the FBI, there exists a division dedicated to investigating and prosecuting criminals on the internet. Welcome to the front lines of the war on cybercrime, where Special Agent Jennifer Marsh has seen it all......until now. A tech-savvy internet predator is displaying his graphic murders on his own website -- and the fate of each of his tormented captives is left in the hands of the public: the more hits his site gets, the faster his victims die. When this game of cat and mouse becomes personal, Marsh and her team must race against the clock to track down this technical mastermind who is virtually untraceable. (Screen Gems-Sony)


GENRE(S): Crime  |  Suspense/Thriller  
WRITTEN BY: Robert Fyvolent
Mark R. Brinker
Allison Burnett
 
DIRECTED BY: Gregory Hoblit  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: May 13, 2008 
Theatrical: January 25, 2008 
RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: USA 

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

75
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
A horrifying thriller, smart and tightly told, and merciless.
Read Full Review
70
Variety Joe Leydon
Unfolding like a better-than-average episode of a first-rate TV police procedural, Untraceable is a satisfying slice of solidly crafted meat-and-potatoes filmmaking.
Read Full Review
70
The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen
Highly watchable, anchored sturdily by Lane's convincing performance.
Read Full Review
70
Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust
If Dick Wolf is interested in doing a "Law & Order: Cyber Crimes," he could do worse than to follow the lead of Untraceable, a diverting police procedural about an FBI unit tasked with sleuthing the Internet for mouse-wielding bad guys.
Read Full Review
67
Entertainment Weekly Clark Collis
Lane skillfully sells the tech-heavy script. But after a much-too-early reveal of the murderer's identity, the ''low battery'' signal starts to flash on this film by thriller specialist Gregory Hoblit, director of last year's far superior "Fracture."
Read Full Review
63
New York Daily News Jack Mathews
I like the idea of a cybercrimes agent cracking cases through superior knowledge of the Internet. Marsh could be a great heroine for a continuing series. But Untraceable essentially forces its audience to identify with those who would be willing accomplices to torture and murder. To understate the point, that's not an audience-friendly approach.
Read Full Review
50
Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
Lane gives the film her best shot; she's pretty much the only reason to see it. There's an intelligence mixed with ferocity that makes her performance compelling, far-more-so than anything else in the film.
Read Full Review
50
Washington Post Ann Hornaday
From its very first scene, Untraceable isn't the sophisticated, brainy thriller it so nearly could have been, but just another movie about a serial murderer.
Read Full Review
50
ReelViews James Berardinelli
The film, which has the ingredients for a thoughtful, tense thriller throws away a compelling first half so it can descend into silliness and clichés.
Read Full Review
50
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Over and over again, Hoblit misses opportunities to make an engaging picture, instead giving us a merely pedestrian one.
Read Full Review
50
TV Guide Ken Fox
Even worse than its hypocrisy, gratuitous homophobia and cheap proselytizing, the movie is dull.
Read Full Review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Kamal AL-Solaylee
While the punishments and triumphs are absolute, the entertainment value is highly equivocal. This ultimately relegates Untraceable to the ranks of so-so thrillers with legitimate but half-developed intellectual aspirations. And since you inspired the movie in the first place, part of the responsibility rests on, well, you.
Read Full Review
50
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Travis Nichols
A genuinely creepy film, though not in a "No Country for Old Men" kind of way. More in an overzealous-blog-comments kind of way, or a dude-on-the-bus-looking-at-me kind of way. Just ugh.
Read Full Review
42
The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
Not only does Untraceable unmask its initially hidden killer with little ceremony, it's the sort of film that telegraphs every new development.
Read Full Review
42
Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell
Yet another mediocre-to-lame thriller shot in Portland.
Read Full Review
40
Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
Computer movies have come a long way since the good old days of monitors projecting vector graphics on hackers’ faces, but there are still some forehead slappers in Untraceable.
Read Full Review
40
Empire Ian Freer
A competent suspenser, helped by the always-dependable Diane Lane, but it suffers by following the modern thriller playbook to the letter.
Read Full Review
38
Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
An abhorrent cyberthriller starring a compelling Diane Lane.
Read Full Review
38
Boston Globe Janice Page
It's a warmed-over suspense thriller that's more disturbing than it is surprising or scary.
Read Full Review
38
Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
The latest, Untraceable, owes everything to “Lambs,” and to “Se7en,” and to all the “Lambs” and “Se7en” knockoffs made by directors less talented than Jonathan Demme and David Fincher. In addition to being dull, the Portland, Ore. -set Untraceable is a monster hypocrite, wagging its finger at the mass audience’s appetite for strictly regimented, “creative” torture scenarios.
Read Full Review
38
USA Today Claudia Puig
A wan version of the same old tired serial killer story, despite its updated milieu -- cyberspace.
Read Full Review
30
Village Voice Nathan Lee
Directed by Gregory Hoblit from a screenplay by a trio (a trio!) of whomevers, Untraceable hasn't the brains of a class-act psychothriller like "The Silence of the Lambs" (though it does reprise that film's titillating homophobia); worse yet, it lacks the balls to juice up the trashy verve of the "Saw" series.
Read Full Review
25
New York Post Kyle Smith
The movie chides us for being a sick voyeuristic society, hungry for the sight of violence. The purity of this moral stance is somewhat clouded by the movie's habit of staging sick violent acts.
Read Full Review
20
Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Tepid, borderline offensive cyber-serial killer thriller.
Read Full Review
20
The New York Times Stephen Holden
You may view Untraceable, as I do, as a repugnant example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn.
Read Full Review
0
Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
By now the hypocrisy of simultaneously condemning and exploiting the audience's sadism has become so commonplace in American movies it hardly seems noteworthy.
Read Full Review
0
Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
This joyless thriller runs the gamut from unconscionable through unwatchable to unendurable.
Read Full Review
0
Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Talk about your pious frauds. I've got a better way to show your disgust for Internet scum: Don't see Untraceable.
Read Full Review
0
San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
As plain awful as Untraceable is, possibly the worst thing about it is that it pretends to mean something.
Read Full Review
0
Time Richard Corliss
Untraceable really is disgraceable. It's bad enough when a movie offers up atrocity scenes that would make the Nanking soldiers seem like Hannah Montana; it's repellent when the movie dresses up the sadism in a moral message that condemns the very weakness it is exploiting.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 5.3 (out of 10) based on 23 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Jason O. gave it an8:
I thought the movie was way better than I thought it was going to be. I think the movie is really interesting to watch and it really goes at a good pace. The movie gets an 8 out of 10 because it was actually worth the $9.50 unlike some movies that are just better to wait for on DVD.

T R. gave it a0:
This movie is stunningly boring and pointless. It takes itself seriously as it follows all the predictable moves of a poorly written plot. I like Diane Lane, but she really must have needed a paycheck to be in this stinker. Don't waste your time on this--staring at the wall is more entertaining.

Joe S. gave it a3:
A very promising premise and several likewise hopeful plot elements are introduced, then discarded without much overall point.

John D gave it a5:
Enjoy this movie for what it is, a repeditive but fun popcorn thriller designed to get you girlfriend to bury her head in your chest.

Patrick D. gave it a0:
This movie is bad on many levels. the script is horrible. the acting is bad. the torture is boring. if this movie wanted to make a statement it should have something going for it. And Chad how dare you compare this with Sunset Boulevard which has amazing acting and dialogue. two things this movie lacks. torture porn is going away, because there is no substance beyond the torture. this movie has no substance and no torture. it was boring. i thought it was going to be funny because of misused tech lingo. it actually did a good job on that just nothing else.

Aaron M gave it a7:
I'd have to agree with the critics who gave this a 70 out of 100. I actually loved the sly social critique that this movie is as it brings about the topics of violence, TV, internet, torture-tainment. If you don't walk away with that part of your consciousness shooting off sparks then...let's just say, you're special. Overall, Diane Lane did an excellent job, the movie told a solid story, and though it may have a fast resolution, it's engaging through and through.

Stephen C. gave it a9:
I think most of the critics were WAY off in rating this movie. It was taut, thrilling and well acted! Diane Lane still remains one of the best, most subtle actresses in Hollywood and it shows in this film. Loved the plot, and the only thing preventing me from giving it a perfect 10 was the waste of Mary Beth Hurt!

Read more user comments...

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | BOOKS | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

About CNET Networks | Jobs | Advertise | Partnerships                                Visit other CNET Networks sites:

Copyright ©2007 CNET Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use