Untraceable

No.

Untraceable was released in theatres on 1/25/08 and then on DVD and Blu-ray on 5/13/08.

There's a disturbing new trend in R rated movies. There was a time... well, for most of my life, I think, when it was absolutely unconscionable for an animal to be killed, or even hurt in a movie. Fuck humans, slice 'em and dice 'em as far as the movie going public was concerned, but until recently, it was rare to see an animal murdered on screen. Two critically acclaimed R rated movies from last year, No Country for Old Men and American Gangster, have scenes in which a dog is shot and killed. Incidentally, Josh Brolin is the actor that shoots both of those dogs. I'm not worried about the motion picture industry; they should have been killing animals for much longer than they have been. Neither is my concern with Josh Brolin; I don't think he has anything against animals, it's probably just a huge coincidence that he has been out of the limelight since Goonies and when he finally makes his big comeback, he only chooses to play puppy-killers. Who I am concerned about is us. Society. Is this a last ditch effort to shock us? Are we so numb that the only way to make us cover our eyes is to is to trap an adorable kitten on a glue trap and turn on heat lamps effectively cooking it? That's the opening sequence in Untraceable. Before the first actor's name apperas on the screen, we're killing kittens.

Untraceable is, when you take out the curses, baked kittens (and people), and the skin floating in a pool of battery acid, just a glorified cop TV series boiled down to it's most important hour and 45 minutes. Actually, it might have been better as a series because the personal lives of the characters and what their job has entailed up to this point might not seem so ridiculous. Not to say that the Cyber Crime Division of the FBI is silly, just that it's portrayed poorly in this movie.

The thing that bothers me the most is actually how good the idea is. With a better cast and screenplay, Untraceable might have been Silence of the Lambsish. As it stands, it might as well have been called CSI: Portland The Movie.