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Broken: Fracture

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Trailer for "Fracture"

There are any number of reasons why you might put down your hard-earned dollars to see a movie. The advertising for Fracture relies heavily on the fact that it stars Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling, which was enough for me: Hopkins is generally as much fun to watch in a bad movie as he is in a good one, and Gosling, whose recent Oscar nomination for the independent film Half Nelson was richly deserved, is one of the most promising young actors in movies at the moment. (A supporting cast that includes David Straithairn and Fiona Shaw doesn’t hurt.)

You may also like to enjoy the look of a film. Set in the high-powered worlds of Los Angeles’ business and legal professions, Fracture is so filled with fabulously photographed architecture and interior design that it sometimes becomes hard to keep your attention on the plot.

Which is useful, because if what you’re interested in is a sleekly written, cunningly plotted courtroom thriller, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.

Twenty years ago, the late Bob Clark, whose two best known movies—A Christmas Story and Porkys—encapsulate the almost ridiculously wide range of quality and subject matter that his career covered, made a nifty little legal comedy called From the Hip. (Well, I thought it was nifty, even though it was slammed mercilessly by reviewers at the time). It starred Judd Nelson as a cocksure attorney who was manipulated by his client, John Hurt, an arrogant genius certain he could use his flaws to beat a murder count.

As directed by Gregory Hoblit (Fallen), Fracture reminded me of that, except that the attorney and criminal are on opposite sides of the case and there are no laughs. Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, a brilliant engineer who plots a way to shoot his cheating wife and get away with it. Gosling is Willy Beachum, a young assistant district attorney who has just leveraged his immaculate trial record into a high-paying, private-sector job. He just has to get this open-and-shut case out of the way before he leaves.

It is of course impossible to look at Hopkins dressed in prison garb and condescending ferociously to everyone around him and not think of Hannibal Lecter—especially when the character is an unflappably calm homicidal genius. The fact that we’ve seen Hopkins play this supercilious character often doesn’t make him any less entertaining. But it works against the film: Crawford begins with a certain amount of our sympathy after we watch his wife cuckolding him, and against our better judgement we root for him to win. At the same time, Gosling’s hotshot lawyer is so smug and successful (a success apparently based more on personal charisma than legal ability) that we root against him, though I don’t think that was intended. When the movie ends the way it must (I can’t possibly be spoiling anything for anyone there), it’s rather disappointing.

But then, by the time the end comes the plot has disappointed us in so many other ways that it hardly matters any more. The title comes from a remark made by Crawford early on about his engineering specialty: “Look closely enough, you’ll find everything has a spot where it can break sooner or later.” You don’t have to look closely at all to find those spots in this plot. Not to give anything away, but it leans impossibly hard on events that could not reasonably be predicted and actions that rational people would not take. Nor are its holes confined to the legal aspect: It exists in a preposterous time frame (the case seems to proceed from crime to trial in the space of a week), and includes an unbelievable sexual subplot (a phrase that is in this case even less redundant than usual).

As for the legal technicality on which the ending rests, I’ll leave it to the lawyers in the audience to decide whether it passes muster. Normally you would give a film the benefit of the doubt and assume that the screenwriters did their homework on something like that, but given the shoddiness of their work up to this point, I’m not taking anything for granted.