regory Hoblit's crime thriller "Untraceable" is a genuinely creepy and suspenseful movie, though not in a "Silence of the Lambs" kind of way. More in a borderline-offensive cyber-serial-killer thriller kind of way.

Unfaithful and Under the Tuscan Sun star Diane Lane plays a widowed, FBI cybercrimes investigator. All seems happy and well until Jennifer goes to work at night, searching out sexual predators and identity thieves online and stumbles across the highly disturbing website. She's bewildered by her latest case, involving a faceless serial killer with a gimmick: he offers live and streaming video of his kidnapped victims on his untraceable website, www.killwithme.com. The more people watch, the faster the victim dies.

The killer, operating in Portland, is seemingly picking out citizens seemingly at random. But it seems the victims are indeed connected, and it's up to Jennifer to piece it all together. Each victim is rigged up to some torture device, and the more people who log on to his website, the quicker the victim bleeds to death (or fries to death with hot lights, or perhaps liquefies in a sulfuric acid soup). Naturally, the website becomes a monstrous hit, with thousands of voyeuristic observers becoming accomplices in the atrocities.

As Jennifer's pursuit of the evasive killer heats up, he eventually sets his sights on Jennifer herself, moving ever closer to her colleague Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks, providing a bit of spark), and even her daughter. Following pretty much every cliché known to the serial-killer genre, Untraceable has Jennifer and her geeky sidekick track the killer with help from a local detective (Billy Burke), going from one advanced, hi-tech heated Internet conversation to another, spitting out phrases like "back door Trojans" and "floating IPs".

The story, written by Robert Fyvolent and Mark R. Brinker, is all pretty ho-hum 21st-century "cyber crimes unit" stuff, wandering from one cliché to the next - albeit with a outrageous amount of close-ups of bloody flayed flesh, skin broiling and scorching, eyes bugging in torment. Even Diane Lane’s brilliant acting can’t divert the conclusion that there aren’t enough layers of visual meanings for the plot to add up emotionally. In the end, "Untraceable" is one of Hoblit's weakest efforts, sleazy and absurd rather than clever and surprising.