I am certain that I saw Untraceable. I have the ticket stub right here, so I know I paid for it, and I can recall a couple of scenes that weren't in the trailer. But the film itself just shot right through my brain without leaving more than a ghost in my memory. And that was hardly 24 hours ago.

Of course I exaggerate, but only a little. The problem with Untraceable isn't exactly that it's forgettable, but rather that it's so unbearably typical that it doesn't really seem worth remembering. There's a bit of gaudy fun to be had at the expense of the insufficiently computer-savvy filmmakers, and the curious sight of a routine procedural getting spiced up with some very weak-kneed torture porn, but pretty much everything about the movie is slickly professional, so slick that nothing about it sticks. It is the perfect example of a winter movie: it has no reason to exist but divert you for long enough that you're not going to complain about spending $9 to sit in a big dark room.

Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) is an agent with the FBI's cyber crimes division, stationed in Portland. Her life is less than ideal, but not so very awful: living with her mother (Mary Beth Hurt), she works nights, which means she doesn't always see as much of her daughter (Perla Haney-Jardine) as she'd like, but she's always there to send Annie off to school, and wakes up in time to have dinner and tuck her in at night. Her job is a fairly easy matter of nabbing credit card fraud artists, swapping witticisms with her younger co-worker Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) under the laissez-faire eye of Section Chief Richard Brooks (Peter Lewis).

That's your movie, right there: the very best scene in the whole movie comes right at the start, setting up Marsh's working world, as she and Dowd shoot the shit while she rather effortlessly shuts down a scam ring operated by a teenager who has stolen nearly a quarter of a million dollars from other people's credit cards. It's a fun scene (mostly: I could have done without the shot of a 15-year-old getting thrown against a police car), and gives us a good sense of who this character is without smacking us over the head with anything. Lane is a better actress than most of her scripts would suggest, and it's honestly entertaining just to watch her doing the workaday business of an FBI agent; and God knows procedurals have been made about less sexy professions than cybercops.

But no, we have to get a super-duper high-concept plot to stick this poor woman into, and it comes in the form of a website showing a kitten that has starved to death in a rat-trap, called www.killwithme.com (the good folks at Sony Pictures do a decent job of sneaking a not-terribly-bad joke into that promotional site). We in the audience have a better idea of what's going on than Marsh does, for we saw the kitten when it was still vital and fluffy, and we saw - or rather, didn't see - the killer who set up a series of web cameras to view the kitten as it slowly died. Initially this doesn't seem to be anything other than a sicko exploiting the internets, but when, a week later, a human being appears on the site, hooked up to an elaborate device that feeds him anti-coagulants based on how many hits the website receives. The more people who watch, the faster he bleeds to death, and Marsh and her team aren't fast enough to save the victim.

Enter the Portland PD, led by Det. Eric Box (Billy Burke) and the surprising (not so much) reveal that the mysterious proprietor of www.killwithme.com is, after a string of foreign ISPs are cleared away, based right in the cyber crime division's backyard. Coincidence?!? Well, actually, it kind of turns out to be, but lots of dialogue in the middle of the movie suggests that it's not.

You know how a 12-year-old gets when they learn something new, in an encyclopedia or magazine or whatever, and they go crazy learning as much as possible about that thing, and become sort of an armchair expert without ever actually grasping the essence of their newfound obsession? It feels like Untraceable is that, with the screenwriters getting really pumped up about internet hacking and being so excited about all the things they can show off that they learned (or, I should say, newbie co-writers Robert Fyvolent and Mark Brinker; the third writer, Allison Burnett, apparently only punched up the screenplay over their foundation, and based on his past work I assume he largely worked on the personal drama, not the procedural stuff). Except that they get things very, very wrong. As the title of the film indicates, the thing that makes their work so very difficult is that the website is untraceable, which is a fairly dubious thing to base a whole movie on. A website can be made extremely hard to find, but "untraceable," not really. The writers either don't know, or they don't care, and they cover up this giant sucking hole with a lot of jargon that proves how awesomely they researched everything, and during the bravura scene where Dowd and Marsh run through all of the ways that the website could be hidden, it takes a stronger viewer than I to think of something other than Geordi La Forge feeding Captain Picard a line of inscrutable technobabble.

Its massive plothole would be enough to sink the movie, but what makes it actively bad is the little details that sit sourly in the mouth. For one, the kitten that opens the film: you may or may not be a cat person, but you must agree that kittens are an awfully convenient shorthand for everything sweet and innocent in life.* There's no reason to open a movie by starving a kitten to death unless you are a mean person. It's worth reiterating that in some half-assed way, this is evidently a kind of torture film, although the torture on display is really quite lame, and filmed by people who are quite afraid of gore. You get all of the moral discomfort with none of the gorehound delight. Fun times!

But mostly, it's just a bland crime movie that puts too much faith in an overbaked concept. Director Gregory Hoblit has made something out of a career out of that - his last work was the tepid Anthony Hopkins/Ryan Gosling procedural Fracture - and it doesn't take much to see that. The plot holes and nastiness (not to mention a startling potshot against net neutrality) are enough to make it bad, but it was never going to be good: it's a program-filler, in a time when we no longer have theatrical programs, and any film that exists just to distract the audience for a bit less than two hours serves essentially no purpose but to keep actors and craftspeople employed.

4/10