How it should read is: "The Elmer Fudd Division bumbles around as they try to hunt down vicious criminals online...but the most dangerous one is probably in another movie."

     Thus is the old Hollywood adage about the worst movies being dumped into the January wasteland proven absolutely true. The new film Untraceable is ineptly directed, brutally miscast, has a script that seems to have been written by a film student dropout, and is even incompetently edited. And if you've never thought the editing of a picture could ruin a film or induce outright laughter, picture a scene where a cop/friend of Diane Lane's character comes to her hotel room with an offer of takeout food. Lane says she needs a shower. Cut to her curled up into a ball in the shower, and then with no smooth transition whatsoever, the two are immediately eating dinner as if nothing happened. Add on top of all this that even the music score by Christopher Young(Spider-Man 3, The Grudge 2) is terrible, and you've got one hell of a contender for next year's Razzies.

     The movie begins with the introduction of FBI Cyber Crimes Specialist Jennifer Marsh(Lane) and her partner Griffin Dowd(Colin Hanks) as they combine their computer skills to track an identity thief who's using ill-gotten credit card numbers and other info to buy thousands of dollars worth of goods. Once they've gotten their man, a new case is passed on to them: a website called KillWithMe.com is up, running footage of a kitten that gets its nine lives used up via an electrified grate. When Marsh and Dowd attempt to trace the site, it reroutes them through dozens of dummy lines and ISPs, convincing them the siteline ends in Russia...where naturally, the FBI has no jurisdiction. They are even snubbed in their pursuit of the case by their division chief Richard Brooks(Peter Lewis), who thinks that charbroiled kitties are no big deal. Brooks might just win the award as most random, incompetant, pea-brained caricature of an FBI head ever put on film. A good leader listens to the advice of his most trusted agents; Brooks never does. A good leader weighs all options carefully, then chooses the one that makes the most sense; Brooks never does. In fact, it seems Brooks makes most judgments while flying by the seat of his pants, ever oblivious to the immovable wall of logic planted firmly in his flight path.

     It turns out, of course, that the site originates somewhere in the city of Portland, Oregon(where Marsh and her crew oper-ate)...a fact which comes to light when a human victim is shown executed in live, streaming video. It then falls to Marsh and Dowd to work with local police detective Eric Box(Billy Burke), who's been investigating the victim's kidnapping, and coordinate all efforts to find the killer before he strikes again. Burke(Fracture, Feast of Love) turns in the film's most unin-tentionally hilarious performance. Not because he's bad, mind you, but simply because it seems that no matter what the situation--breaking down a door in pursuit of the killer, attempting to comfort Marsh when a close friend becomes a victim--it seems Burke just doesn't care about being there. Honestly, one can only imagine that Burke must have either owed director Gregory Hoblit(Fallen, Fracture) a favor, or signed a contract for a big paycheck without looking at the script. Having then read that script, he might have just gone "ugh...!" and figured that just because he was obligated to be in the film, it didn't mean his brain couldn't check out and go on mental vacation while he delivered his lines. Seriously, the poor guy seems to be bored in every scene he's a part of, and one almost expects to see him sneaking a peek at his watch whenever possible.

     How many writers does it take to screw up a screenplay? The answer in this case is three: both Robert Fyvolent and Mark Brinker make their uninspiring debuts with this story, and Allison Burnett--who delivered last year's enjoyable Resurrecting the Champ--simply has no excuse. Unless of course the draft he worked on with the duo was actually better than we'll ever know, and once he finished his part, the trained monkeys threw feces all over it to mark their territory. Speak-ing of them, according to their official bios, the first two writers are smarter than the script they wrote. Fyvolent is a lawyer first and foremost, and Brinker is a doctor with several pat-ents. The bio on Brinker does in fact say "Incredibly, writing for Hollywood is not Brinker's primary career." I'm not surprised...if not for reading the bio, based on the storyline of Untraceable, I would have guessed he was a plumber. The works are cer-tainly gummed up enough: there's just enough computer/inter-net technobabble in the film to make it sound like the screen-writers know what they're talking about in relation to how cyber-tracing and hacking works, but which will leave anyone who has an I.Q. above four ROFL. There is a scene where the killer manages to hack into the computer of Marsh's car while she's driving on a rain-slicked street, bringing her of course to a dead halt at the exact spot where he wants to trap her. WTF? If such a thing were even within the realm of possibility, the number of fatalities of stupid people who can't drive that I alone would cause would simply be incalculable.

     The killer's traps are elaborate, bordering on the level of a James Bond villain. He's obviously a super-genius, who of course becomes as incompetent as Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Road Runner, once Marsh finally is in his clutches. In an earlier scene, where Marsh and crew finally figure out who he is and connect the dots as to why he's killing certain people(too LOL to go into here), it suddenly leads to the realization(on the audience's part, not the dimwits involved in the investigation...an investigation that could've been solved in ten minutes by The Kids Next Door) that there are several crucial bits of info missing which would explain not only how the killer has the knowledge to design such elaborate torture devices, but how he even has the money to buy all the equip-ment he needs. Seriously: ya gotta have a j-o-b if you wanna KIll With Me!