Mediocrity reigns in creepy Web scare flick 'Untraceable'

Gregory Hoblit's crime thriller "Untraceable" is 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. This might be by design; after all, the movie is about Internet creepiness, but that doesn't quite justify the hour and a half anyone might spend watching it.

Diane Lane stars as FBI Agent Jennifer Marsh, a widow living in an absurdly rainy present-day Portland (where all the Internet trolls live, of course). There, she shares an old Victorian with her dowdy mother and 8-year-old daughter. She drives a Saab, listens to public radio, likes cats and always seems to be either jumping in or stepping out of the shower. In other words, Marsh is the last person you might think could stop the identity thieves and sexual predators on the Internet, but stop them she does on the night shift in a grim-looking office with Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks).

It's all pretty ho-hum 21st-century "cyber crimes unit" stuff, until Marsh gets a tip about a certain Web site, www.killwithme.com. On this webmaster's worst nightmare, the host first kills a kitten, then a hockey fan, then a newscaster, and then so on, all streaming live, all at a rate determined by the number of visitors to the site. The more people look, the faster the victim dies. It's like one big Google ad for death, and Lane's in charge of stopping it, though truthfully she would rather just be at her daughter's birthday party.

It is a decent setup for a thriller, and one imagines it's pitched at the wide swath of America not keen on bootleg copies of the "Saw" franchise or the more disturbing videos on YouTube. "It's a jungle in there," Hanks' character says after the first live broadcast murder, and one can guess that TV producer-turned-director Hoblit hopes the audience feels the same.

Lane and Hanks do their best to help us through such pandering -- she handles her role with dignity. But adequate performances won't stop viewers from noticing the film's mediocrity, even though, OMG, it's killing us.