Review: Fracture

The premise is a very promising proposition. Instead of ending with the main antagonist unloading his gun in the head of a character and fading to black, that's where Gregory Hoblit's taught drama chooses to start. Anthony Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer and all around genius, so when he catches his wife's betrayal with another man, he shoots her in cold blood. What was seen as a slam dunk with both a written confession and guilty plea planned, a cocky DA on the rise by the name of Willy Beachum sees this as the prefect opportunity to add another check to his win column just before leaving civil work for a more prestigious law firm. But when Crawford changes his plea to not guilty and the evidence fails to add up, Beachum has to find some answer before the trial is acquitted and his career goes down the drain for losing such a high profile case.

Everything in Fracture felt like a rehash of every film that has ever centered around a cat and mouse type game of wits. There were times where I was finishing the characters lines in my head, it was that predictable. To its credit, the movie does a very good job of trying to put the story together in a new way. But it's not enough to simply shuffle the deck, some time you need to open up a new pack.

Without any real explanation the movie seemingly reaches the pinnacle of the story just after the midway point, and continues to fester until the obligatory big reveal at the end. Which is a shame, because the story, characters and idea in general are the types of things that provide for a very entertaining watch. But here we're never told the story in the right way, shown the characters personal sides, and the film is never allowed the pace it needs to be as methodical as it wants to be. Instead we're rushed from one thing to another given the bare details and not once allowed to settle down and understand why we should care about these characters.

Even the films big reveal at the end lacks the punch it needed because of the lack of build up and connection with the characters. All the time the creators wasted during the first two acts setting up the big reveals go squandered because they left out the one thing that brings everything together: the main character. While Ryan Gosling is without a doubt one of the best actors working today, we aren't given any reason to pull for him other than the fact that he's up against a man that we all know full well killed his wife in cold blood. That's it.

Incorporating several subplots and side characters that never seem to amount to anything, they are seemingly there only to drag out the story. Which forces the film to suddenly go in to overdrive, revealing countless pieces of information at an unrealistic pace. The main problem with the movie is that it thinks its being clever and coy but seems to become so full of itself that half way through realizes that it has wasted a lot of both the story's and our time.

The thought of both Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling playing off of one another in a psychological game of cat and mouse was the kind of pairing that we hardly get to see these days. Their interplay with one another is almost worth a rental alone, seeing both a veteran and promising young talent on screen like this hardly ever lives up to expectations, but Fracture delivers in spades. Sadly, there isn't much more to the film then a couple of high caliber actors who single handedly save the production thanks to their talent; it would have been nice if like the main cast members, the screenwriter had been on his A-game.