One of the first things that happens in this movie is that we get a little camera’s-eye-view of a camera being moved from one end of a room to another, and I had the most awful Cloverfield flashbacks. Thankfully, that only lasted a few seconds, but I was definitely nervous for a while.
So the basis here is simple, even if the tech is so complicated as to go completely over my head: Someone with more computer skills than sanity (a lot more) is kidnapping and torturing people to death, while broadcasting the whole show on the internet, free for anyone to watch, download, and comment upon. The website is called www.killwithme.com, and yes, there is a replica of the site from the film at that address. Go check if you want; I’ll wait. I didn’t quite have the nerve to hit enter myself, though…
The gimmick in the film, you see, is that the more people view the site, the faster the victim on camera dies. Thanks to all the blogs, chat rooms, iPhones, Blackberries, and people who spend even more time online than I do, the victims die faster than the mainstream media can rush to the moral high ground by refusing to give out the web address. This is where our heroine come in: Diane Lane as FBI Special Agent Jennifer Marsh, part of the internet crimes unit. She usually tracks identity thieves and other such scammers, but this time she hits the law enforcement jackpot, so to speak — a real live serial killer.
She doesn’t much want the case at first — she has a young daughter, Annie, and usually works nights (which probably is the best time to catch computer crooks anyway), but she can’t duck the job, and she and her partner, Griffin (Colin Hanks) quickly discover they’ve got a real problem. The murderer has some sneaky way of using other domains to keep anyone from tracking and shutting down the site, so the usual methods don’t work. They have to find other ways to hunt him, but of course the body count is rising all this time.
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| Welcome to beautiful, rainy Portland, Oregon, creating a new breed of serial killer for the 21st century. |
This brings me to something that I’ve always wondered about. This guy is stalking, kidnapping and tormenting people, not to mention all the time he has to spend designing and building the weird gadgets that help do the killing, so he can’t possibly be holding down any kind of decent job. And yet he has huge piles of computers, electronics and camera gear, probably worth more than my entire house. So where do these serial killers get their funding? Maybe that’s something the government should be looking into to help the economy.
Anyway, he finds the time and the money to stalk the agents and police chasing him, and you can probably make a very good guess as to what happens from there. That’s the big problem with the film… the chase is interesting and quite realistic, as far as I can tell; the dialogue keeps the technobabble to a minimum, thankfully; but you always know where things are going… so it’s kind of the opposite of untraceable, really.
So I can’t go any higher than three idols, and even that feels like a bit of a stretch. It’s a shame, because the actors all do well, and they have one of the creepiest-looking movie killers ever, but there’s just not enough suspense to keep things moving the way they should move. It’s disturbing to see the victims dying, but there’s also a sense of futility along with it that sort of made me give up. Unfortunately, the film is probably totally accurate in its prediction — a site like that would get millions of hits very, very quickly, and very few people would ever imagine they were really doing anything wrong with their clicks and comments. Basically no one shocks easily enough anymore. But if the thought of hurting someone the next time you click your way to the next big internet fad doesn’t stop you, just imagine all the weird spam that might flood your screen.