Why torture yourself like these actors did?

"Untraceable," a nasty piece of work from director Gregory Hoblit, is guilty of wallowing in precisely what it pretends to condemn: torture porn. In it, a group of FBI agents in Portland's cybercrime division frantically try to track down the location of a Web site on which a sicko slowly murders a victim in live, streaming online video.

The more traffic the site gets, the more the victim's torture is multiplied — blistering heat lamps, immersion in battery acid, dangling above the whirling blades of a rotary tiller — all of which we're shown in unrelenting, skin-peeling detail. And, as the movie progresses, the victims become characters we know and like, and the camera goes ever-closer as we watch them scream. Sound like fun?

It's a pity, because Hoblit knows exactly how to hold an audience's suspense without resorting to gratuitous gore. "Fracture," his Anthony Hopkins/Ryan Gosling thriller released last year, was a thoroughly enjoyable cat-and-mouse game in which Hopkins' character tried to get away with murder. Hoblit didn't rub our nose in the plot's gruesome details but dangled them out of reach, letting us instead focus on the actors' performances. Here, good performers like Diane Lane, Colin Hanks and Mary Beth Hurt are lost in the gore; they're not characters but contrivances designed to get us to the real show.

Lane plays FBI special agent Jennifer Marsh, a widow who lives with her mother (Hurt) and young daughter (Perla Haney-Jardine), and she brings a likable, no-nonsense toughness to the role. But there's little she can do with the fact that Jennifer, as crafted by a team of three screenwriters, is a bit of a dim bulb. Why would an FBI cybercrime specialist allow her 8-year-old to randomly download games from unknown locations? Why does she repeatedly endanger herself? Why does she dress only in clothing that perfectly matches the drab blue-and-gray FBI offices? (OK, that's not dim, it's just kind of funny.)

In between the gruesome murders, we get a lot of scenes of FBI agents clicking their mouses and speaking impenetrable dialogue about things like "backdoor Trojans," "exploited servers" and "blackholing IPs," punctuated by numerous shots of a very, very wet downtown Portland. There's precisely one fresh detail: A crucial plot point turns on the fact that a character is able to communicate in Morse code by blinking both eyes at the same time (right eye for dots, left eye for dashes), which all of us will have to keep in mind next time we're trapped but facing a video camera. "Untraceable" isn't unwatchable, but it's a pretty miserable experience, from a director who knows better.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com