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Untraceable. No kidding. At this point it would be easier to trace a dust mite across Paris Hilton’s library card.

Let me present to you the dumbest movie of the year. Untraceable might even be the dumbest movie in a number of years. I’m pained to tell you it took three people to write it.

Here’s a clanker of a plot. It begins with Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane), a computer crimes investigator with the FBI. We know this is Diane Lane because, yep, that’s her naked standing behind opaque shower doors … three times. In the movie’s first glaring mistake, she’s shown carrying a gun even though her job is to apparently type with maddening accuracy on a keyboard all day. She works in one of those offices that was designed from TiVo’d episodes of 24: speed-of-light web access, all-inclusive security access (DoD, CIA, NSA, Dominos Pizza), and computer stations with five monitors but only one keyboard and mouse.

To set up how good Jennifer is at her job, she’s allowed to nab an Internet fraudster with three keystrokes — one to ping an IP address, another to call in a SWAT team, and one last one to bypass a little legal thing called a warrant. The last shot of the sequence involves her analyzing a clue that no detective, Nancy Drew included, could have figured out without reading minds in some other dimension in space and time. But whatever.

The next day, a Web site (www.killwithme.com) starts showing up in blogs and on Internet postings. The home page features a man tied to a metal bed frame bleeding from his chest. The wounds aren’t bad, but a bag of blood thinner is hooked up to his arm. The more people view the site, the more the thinner is injected into his veins. If too many people log on the man will bleed to death. If this sounds like the entire Saw series — gruesome deaths, over-engineered torture devices, bloody voyeurism — then you’re on the right page.

Anyway, the man dies because Internet users not only tune in but sign up for the free newsletter and RSS feed. Of course, more victims eventually appear on the site — one in an acid bath and another who hangs perilously close to a garden tiller — to the dismay of Jennifer, who’s hot on the case. Her method of police work involves calling out source’s names and explaining their cookie folders in detailed prose, although I’m positive these characters are not actually in the film, or even described in omniscient terms. They just exist for someone to talk about.

As if that White Pages-like list of names weren’t enough, we’re thrown several red herrings for good measure. One of them is a brooding cop with the charm of a suave villain but the chin of a bumbling hero. He actually is a genuine cop, which makes me wonder if the makers of Untraceable ever noticed that their own editing was setting him up as a bad guy. That or they’re just dense.

The real villain has dozens of secret motives and apparently a really good Wi-Fi connection. The danger with this movie is that it sets up a villain that knows everything. No, seriously, everything. This is because he’s hacked into the Everything Database using a ping-protected IP nanorobot. And when a villain knows more than the Almighty the movie looks pretty stupid when he fails at the end. Oops, did I give something away?

Shame on all those involved here. Director Gregory Hoblit helmed one of my favorite films from 2000: Frequency. Even Colin Hanks — yes, Tom Hanks’ son — who plays a spectacled techie, can’t hit a decent note. Diane Lane was an Oscar nominee just four years ago. I got a laugh out of one blogger who suggested we all take turns guessing Diane Lane’s next “Un ” movie. She’s already done Unfaithful, Under the Tuscan Sun and now Untraceable. She's trying to corner the market on the U shelf at the local video store.

This movie really irks me with the way it does its preaching. Its message: by viewing Internet violence, be it on YouTube or jihadist Web sites, viewers are contributing to Web-based terror as much as the perpetrators themselves. Ok, agreed. But it preaches this through the Torture Porn genre, a kind of film becoming popular among gorehounds because it shows hopelessly exploitive and deliberately graphic views of uninterrupted pain and punishment. So Untraceable, kind of Torture Porn Lite, indicts us for viewing violence by showing us violence. It’s like protesting IEDs by blowing them up with nuclear weapons.

Overall, Untraceable is just ridiculous, neither thrilling nor intelligent. It just poops along for cheap, violent thrills with ludicrously stupid dialogue and plot. Case in point: a character, his entire body boiling in acid, blinks a clue in Morse code.

And I have only one response to that: Long blink, short blink; long blink, long blink, long blink; long blink; short blink, short blink, short blink, short blink; short blink, long blink; long blink, short blink; long blink, short blink, long blink; short blink, short blink, short blink.