Theatrical Review of Untraceable

Pretty good review, I would agree with most of it expect this...

"In one of the more glaring examples of incompetence, her daughter and mother disappear from a motel room to set up the finale. Okay, fine, we´ve seen this approach a thousand times. Yet does she report their disappearance to her FBI buddies? Does she wait for backup before rushing off to find them? And, as if to compound character incompetence with script tomfoolery, neither the mother nor the daughter are brought back in any way, shape or form to resolve their story. Dead? Alive? Moved to Morocco? Who knows."

I don't know what movie (or cut) you watched but that never happened in the movie. Only scene that has to do with the motel room is when she is packing up her cat, which then leads the end. They were staying at different motels, hence the line that the mother and daughter were going to be a few hours of town and she was going to stay somewhere closer to work.

In any regard, I enjoyed the movie. There where some issues, which you mentioned but it was enjoyable and I rather liked the ending.

I was under the impression the hotel room the cat was in happened to be the one the mother and daughter were also at. My reasoning: what is the point of Jennifer going to the hotel to get the cat at all? It's not a major character in the film nor is it very important.

Supporting evidence: Jennifer either runs into the hotel room or out of the hotel room with her weapon drawn. She is manic when she gets in her car and goes over the bridge. Why are the mother and daughter not heard from for the rest of the movie?

Jason

[Post edited by JJ79 on Jan 26, 2008]

Well people care alot about their pets besides this was my understanding of the scene:

She told her boss she was only going to take a day off. So why leave the hotel at all? She approached the hotel calmly and then stopped while going into the door because she thought she heard something. Then she pulled out the gun. Once the room is clear she grabbed the cat and left. Like she realized she needed to go somewhere else. There was never anything to suggest that he nabbed the family, nothing at all. He went after her, not her family. If he had her family why go through the trouble of setting up the trap on the bridge?

I won't dispute I could have misinterpreted what happened. However, why did Owen put the camera on Jennifer's house in the first place? Why did he control the camera and put it on the kid for everyone to see? Yes, he did mockingly ask the watchers if they thought he would honestly let them hurt a child but the fact remains he put the camera outside the house and followed the daughter.

Jason

Why would anybody go to that extremes to make a point? It's a movie, that scene just basically served to create tension and suspense. The movie certainly wasn't perfect but I did find it refreshing to see a movie that had alot of computer hacking in it actually have a grounding in reality (Hackers, The Net are bad examples). Most movies don't even go off a real OS, just some fake flash thing. In this you could actually see them using Windows Vista, the computer lingo was correct, and the characters actually acted like they knew how to use a computer (characters typed fast and didn't look at the keyboard). The movie wasn't perfect in that regard either (for example I can think of a few more things to try to trace the computer and I'm not even a hacker) but it was a step in the right direction for Hollywood.