Untraceable emerges as cinema’s logical current evolutionary product of genus horror, species thrill/serial killer. Combining the subspecies subplot of the psychopath who fattens on publicity, embracing many Jack the Ripper clones, with at least equal time for that of the Dirty Harry cop or Se7en uneasy buddy cops in their plodding methods, the Gregory Hoblit movie wears its long lineage on its sleeve.

Allison Burnett’s screenplay from original story and script by Mark R. Brinker and Robert Fyvolent has its moments, does not wallow in shock-gore, keeps threatening love interest to a low profile and raises shuddery specters of what might soon be unthinkable reality. In the final analysis, however, the whole appears too derivative of other better or worse kindred. It also features flat stereotype characterization and acting, and is positively sidetracked by an unfortunate try at giving FBI Agent Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) a vulnerable single-mother side with her silently disapproving mother Stella (Mary Beth Hurt) and eight-year-old daughter (Perla Haney-Jardine, as Annie Haskins) from a happy relationship with a fellow agent killed in the line of duty.

Untraceable could have been unnerving, and prescient, for two unsettling premises. First is that the Internet’s adaptability for crime and terror, actually exemplified by a rapidly expanding specialized FBI division, may not be confined to identity theft or child pornography and seduction but, in improper but capable hands, be expanded to become itself part and parcel of acts of sadism and murder. J-horror has fastened onto video and cell-phone communication as the basis for (usually unexplained supernatural) teen-terror, and the present instance simply carries technology forward to the next level.

Second, implied but not explored, is the national fascination with roadkill, the more splatter the better. Disaster attracts -- symbolically, Agent Marsh is held up in rubbernecking “gapers’ block” on a bridge -- and, taunting authority, a twisted mind may get it off with the attention given its bloody deeds. Though discredited in the endless wake of our single greatest gawking -- O.J. in the white Bronco -- Mark Fuhrman knowingly insists that the “complex and problematic role of the media and high-intensity coverage [causes] too many cases to go sideways.” The film’s Portland police -- FBI profiler John Douglas characterized the Pacific Northwest as “America’s killing fields” -- and  Federal investigators ask for media restraint, but the titillating news is published, in turn upping the ante and the mayhem.

Hoblit’s father was FBI, and, a stickler for detail, the director checked facts with the Bureau and computer experts, so that the capabilities and cyberbabble are theoretically accurate, if so bewildering that Marsh’s one-note boss Brooks (Peter Lewis) hasn’t a clue as to her explanations. Behind chatline aliases or come-ons to schemers and scammers, she and coworker Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) are alerted to a new site brilliantly untraceable through layers of servers and hosts.

Streaming in real time, its homepage of blood-red titles and an X-rayed skull, killwithme.com opens with a stolen kitten stuck on rattrap paper, where it will die on-screen alongside the number of viewer hits. The animal is soon replaced by live human victims. Lured by hockey tickets, Herbert Miller (Tim De Zarn) dies before the Web audience’s eyes, the more viewers the more quickly anticoagulant lets him bleed to death. Channel 12 reporter David Williams (Chris Cousins) is trapped by an ad for toy trains and, again depending on runaway ratings, toasted to death by sunlamps.

A local and Federal task force enlists Marsh, along with blunt but sympathetic Homicide Detective Eric Box (Billy Burke), whose own force partner Tom Moy (Daniel Liu) conveniently fades so that tell-it-like-it-is Box and stoic Marsh can team.

SPOILER ALERT

Relatively early, the face, mannerisms and street address of “brilliant” twenty-year-old sicko perp Owen Reilly (Joseph Cross) are revealed to us, but false leads and mental slowness keep film authorities in the dark. There is method to Reilly’s madness, it turns out, although later summary of its origins and an interconnectedness among victims is too sloppy and quick to follow entirely. Dark shots of Agent Marsh’s home are meant to be foreboding, and, separately, she and her family are evacuated to not-very-protective protective custody.

Another entrapment, closer to home, and a third person perishes as manically ascending ratings drip acid into a water tank, but this time eye-blink code gives a clue. Now, and as fully expected, the heroine is stalked. After all the investigation smoke, she resolves the problem à la Rambo. Neatly dispatched, twisted Owen is just another dangerous nutter, nowhere in a league with Tony Curtis’ compelling The Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo.

The potential for gore is held in relative check, and, especially in light of the context, fingers on keyboards are admirably few. But what is left is no more than run-of-your-mill. Some day, a thought-out cyberkiller movie is bound to come along. Wait, for this is not it.

(Released by Screen Gems and rated “R” for prolonged sequences of strong gruesome violence and language.)