Those who still relish the sight of Anthony Hopkins portraying an evil criminal mastermind will get the most out of Fracture, which is not so much a whodunit — we see Hopkins' character putting a bullet in his wife's head in the movie's first few minutes — as a howdunnit. Gregory Hoblit, directing from a script by Daniel Pynes and Glenn Gers, revisits the courtroom thriller genre of his 1996 Primal Fear with somewhat less galvanic results.
We understand something's seriously afoot when the police negotiator who comes to get Hopkins' Crawford, an ingenious aeronautic magnate, out of the house where he's shot his wife turns out to be the same guy we saw said wife making love with some minutes earlier. Subsequent entirely plausible procedural lapses lead to a confession (to attempted murder, as Crawford's shot has left his wife in a coma) that turns out to be inadmissible, and worse still, the so-called murder weapon retrieved at the scene turns out to have never been fired.
None of which initially bothers hotshot Assistant D.A. Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling) much. The soon-to-be-former prosecutor has a conviction record in the high 90th percentile, and he figures he'll get one more under his belt before he takes off to make real money in the corporate world. But Crawford's got him figured too, and the very-self satisfied shooter seems to be getting as much pleasure out of making a monkey out of Beachum as he is out of getting away with (attempted) murder.
Fracture moves along at a spanking pace as the driven Gosling bangs his head against the wall trying to both solve the case and, as it were, serve two masters — the savvy D.A. he's about to dump (David Straithairn) and the appealing big-law-firm hotshot he's gotten into a romantic relationship with before even establishing a working relationship (Pike). We know that Gosling's going to crack the case and find his true calling, and much of the pleasure of this film comes from watching him do it, even though the key to the cracking will not be terribly revelatory to (warning: potential spoiler alert) those who are conversant with a certain detective story by Edgar Allan Poe that isn't about a homicidal gorilla.
Hopkins certainly needn't expend too much effort at playing brilliant, nasty, and smug, although for some reason he injects a little Irish into his normal accent. Whatever keeps it interesting for him, I suppose.
Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.