Hollywood, like
the Ivy League, is rooted in legacies, so it’s not surprising that certain
opportunities would present themselves to Colin Hanks, the now 30-year-old son
of Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks. At the same age, the older Hanks had under his belt a solid
commercial showing (to the tune of $70 million) with 1984’s Splash, a decent follow-up with that
summer’s Bachelor Party, and was
treading water in comedies like The Man
with One Red Shoe, Volunteers and
The Money Pit. His niche, if
certainly not completely his future success, seemed somewhat determined.

For Colin Hanks, things are a bit different. But with a
mushrooming body of work (his latest film, The
Great Buck Howard, which includes his father playing his father, recently
unspooled at Sundance), a future once cloudy is coming into a bit sharper
focus. Heading into 2008, the younger Hanks has a number of high-profile
commercial gigs, along with some idiosyncratic-sounding indie fare.

First up is this week’s Internet thriller Untraceable. Hanks already has some
experience with unsettling depictions of voyeurism, in 2006’s
consigned-to-video Alone with Her,
opposite Ana Claudia Talancón and Jordana Spiro. In Untraceable, however, he’s on the other side of the law, playing a
young FBI agent opposite Diane Lane
as they attempt to take down a killer who’s broadcasting live, streaming video
of his ghastly crimes and using a complicit audiences’ viewership as a weapon.

At a Portland-set field office of the FBI, a special
subdivision of the bureau investigates cyber-crime, mostly tracking identity
predators and other white-collar-type crimes. Soon they get a grisly tip,
though. A tech-savvy predator is displaying graphic murders on his own website,
with the fate of each of his tormented captives left in the hands of the
public: the more hits his site gets, the faster his victims die. It starts with
a kitten stuck to a glue-trap — which helps special agent Jennifer Marsh (Lane)
and her partner, Griffin Dowd (Hanks), determine that the events are of a local
origin — but quickly the ante is upped with a series of kidnappings and more
rapidly unfolding deaths. With the assistance of a local homicide detective,
Eric Box (Billy Burke), single mother Marsh tries to unravel the mystery, even
as she herself becomes the target of the killer.

Like some bastard offspring of Fear Dotcom, The Net and
the Saw films, Untraceable suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen; it wants to
be topical, or of-the-moment, but also cling to conventions for the sake of
narrative ease. To assuage worries about any lingering, lasting unpleasantness,
the movie’s scripters (it’s a cobbled together affair, written by Allison Burnett, Robert Fyvolent and Mark R. Brinker, with the latter two getting story
credit) ascribe a very specific motivation to the killer — there’s a reason for
his acts, as well as the selection of many of his victims.

This sort of directly air-quote competitive antagonism —
nipped from more assertively rooted serial killer flicks like Seven, Zodiac and the second Saw
film — is of course hogwash, utterly incongruous. It just doesn’t play. General implausibilities
aside, though, it’s matched by both a substandard execution that doesn’t measure
up to the best of the rest of director Gregory Hoblit’s work (Fallen, Primal Fear, Fracture),
as well as a third act steeplechase that includes a baffling direct
confrontation on a rainy bridge; a long, explanatory passage of revelation
about what we’ve seen, and the offscreen events that brought us there; and a
“ripcord ending” that wraps things up in faux-sober and thought-provoking
style.

Untraceable could
have been a much more interesting film — one to live up to its poster — if it had simply stayed closer to its wonkish
roots, Internet-flavored thriller. (Instead we get the one obligatory
e-takedown, showing how cyber-patrolling busts porn-loving gun-runners and
their deadbeat minor sons.) The melding of this new-fangled milieu with a more
tawdry narrative, however, just doesn’t work.

Whether it nominally succeeds or fails at the box office,
however, not much of Untraceable’s
failings should be able to be traced back to Hanks. His is a solid supporting
part unrelated to the movie’s shortcomings, and he does capable work that
doesn’t hurt himself — an analysis that might befit a lot of his steady upwards
trajectory. After getting his start on the small screen, playing Alex
Whitman on Roswell for parts of three
seasons, Hanks made his big screen leading man debut in Orange County, a second-generation comedy of college anxiety costarring
Schuyler Fisk (daughter of Jack Fisk and Sissy Spacek), and directed by Jake
Kasdan. Hanks then signed on for a tour of duty in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, whose long production in New
Zealand explains a little gap in his
filmography.

Other, forthcoming projects, however, shine a light on lessons
Hanks may have learned from his father, from choice costars to branching out
into life behind the camera. Out of Sundance comes word that Hanks will be
directing a documentary about the decline of the music industry over the past
decade and a half. Also, in writer-director George Gallo’s My Mom’s New Boyfriend, the younger Hanks will follow further in
his father’s footsteps, playing a federal agent tasked with spying on his
mother and her new beau, suspects in an art heist ring. The twist? Meg Ryan, a
frequent costar of his father, will play not his love interest, but said mother. Wow. Time flies… (Sony/Screen Gems, R, 100 minutes) For the full, slightly tweaked review, from FilmStew, click here.