Fracture (2007)

Good thriller...not an oscar film but fun

This movie is enjoyable and while it won't have you guessing until the last (its easy enough to figure out) it is well acted and enjoyable all the same. The only thing that bothered me was Hopkins character had many many plans thought out to the last detail and I wondered how then, he could forget the obvious (I wont give detail to spoil it) but the answer is simple isn't it: This IS Hollywood. June 10, 2008

Average and Not Enough Anthony

Fracture looked compelling in the trailers, and with Anthony Hopkins - even more so. Well, as it turns out, Fracture is neither a terribly gripping thriller nor a court room drama - it's somewhere in between and falls into the class of the above-average TV movie. Hopkins is inscrutable as always, but unfortunately, we don't quite get the battle of wits that we did in Silence of the Lambs. In this one, Ryan Gosling plays the male version of Foster's ingenue, but not as impressively. The film opens well with gorgeous photography, but then slips into a tepid, scratch-your-head mode with Gosling trying his best to figure out the non-existence of clues. Unfortunately, the audience feels similarly uninvolved and there isn't much of a subplot either, leading us to the ending where the chemistry between cat and mouse heats up but only momentarily. Not an easy script, but a lot more mystery upfront and more scenes with Sir Anthony would've moved this along immensely.

In short, for those expecting a dark psychological thriller, or a good courtroom flick - go check out Michael Clayton or Runaway Jury instead. June 8, 2008

The Making of Jack McCoy

I first saw this movie on HBO, and while I was glad I didn't pay money in a theater to see it, I still don't think it's the biggest waste of movie time ever. (I'm still trying to get back the 90 minutes of my life I lost to "The Forgotten," though I long since made Time-Warner refund me the $3.99 charge for its rental.) Initially I would have given Fracture 2 stars, but once I started thinking of Willie as a young Jack McCoy of Law and Order I decided it was really more of a 3, almost a 3.5 star movie.

This movie had nothing to do with Jack McCoy or Law and Order, I just felt like it should have. Other reviewers said they would have been more accepting of this as a TV movie, and I came to agree. It would have been the perfect NBC Sunday night movie about how Jack McCoy of Law and Order came to be who he is.

It should have been a better movie; the writing, directing and acting could all have been better. Hopkins is adept in his role as the intelligent and manipulative psychopath. Backhandedly overbearing, he subtly insults even while playing disarmingly naïve, dropping hints to people that he is smarter than and a few steps ahead of them. Gosling is convincing as the cocky, overconfident young man. Typically he is not easily fooled and fairly unflappable, as certain of his success in the bedroom as the courtroom, but Gosling played his role with a bit too much of the "it's all good" attitude. He wasn't very convincing in scenes that were supposed to display urgency or intensity, not in the courtroom or out of it. There also wasn't much chemistry between him and Nikki, his new boss and romantic interest. That she was his new boss with whom he immediately gets involved with, and given that it was a job he got with an off hand legal stunt and still had to prove himself at should have made their affair feel more risqué, but didn't. I generally couldn't feel the heat of his anger, frustration, or even lust. This could also have due to poor writing, directing, and maybe even casting. He did have one really good scene with one of the detectives, the one played by Cliff Curtis, where they were both frustrated with events and each other and played it well, so I couldn't be sure he couldn't deliver more emotional intensity if the movie had been better written and directed. Unfortunately the parts where tension and suspense were supposed to be building generally fell flat.

Now if it had been about Jack McCoy, Lobruto could have been Adam Schiff, making the scenes between them more emotionally charged, particularly the one where Willie says "that's what this is about, I'm not going to be you in 20 years" to Lobruto. Lobruto knows Willie better than Willie knows himself and seems to be able to mentor him in the same way Adam Schiff might have mentored a young Jack McCoy. Fracture wasn't made for the Law and Order franchise, unfortunately.

As far as the DVD extras, there wasn't that much, but there are a lot of better movies with fewer DVD extras. Deleted scenes and alternate endings were included. They were interesting to see but better left out of the movie, in my opinion. There was no commentary track though and that seemed like sour grapes to me.

This is the story of a confident young lawyer that knows how to win and remain ethical, (even if he's riding the line ethically) but learns how to care. It's neither the best nor worst movie you'll ever see. I went ahead and got it from Amazon market place because I would have gotten it from the $5.50 bin at Wal-Mart, I just don't feel like waiting for it to get there.
May 20, 2008

Bad--really bad

"Fracture" is the kind of movie you watch when you've become resigned to merely being entertained, and even then only require a little bit of motion on the screen to capture and keep your attention for the agonizing two hours of this film.

Ryan Gosling is almost decent as a DA who is trying to be too many things at once: really macho (he does some chin ups on a bar), a lawyer (he's terrible in court), charming (he smiles at a few women once in awhile), etc. At no point does his character cohere into anything believable or
interesting. He's just there and actually doesn't talk that much.

Anthony Hopkins is good, as always, playing a creepy old brilliant nut who kills his promiscuous wife and calculatingly removes any evidence linking him to the murder. Unfortunately there isn't much to work with because he has very few scenes in which the director allows him to talk. Everybody sort of stands there and nods.

My disgust with the film grew to such a ferocious pitch that I began to enjoy Hopkins' tooling around with Gosling's colorless character. His wife, who spends most of the movie in a vegetative state, is more enthralling than the people who are conscious and walking around.

Maybe this is a real thrill for those in law school, but for my part I can't imagine why a director would take two tremendous actors and waste them so badly.

Zzzz... May 3, 2008

Below average thriller does little more than lay ground for a sequel

The most enlightenment I got from this film was reading the Amazon promotional material, which indicates well-known critics like Rex Reed called this film "smart" and interesting. I found little of either in this boring rehash of roles Anthony Hopkins has lived off since his Hanibal Lechter days merged with a dull courtroom drama.

Hopkins is an aerodesigner that kills his wife, who's had an affair. He manages to get even with the guy that cuckolded him during the investigation and is tried by hotshot prosecutor Ryan Gosling, a walking, gum-chewing, guffawing cliche of one of Hollywood's great archetypes. Mr. Cliche gets surprised by the way Hanibal, er Hopkins, sets up the crime so he can't be found guilty (in fact, he can't even be tried.)

But, wait, as they say in the infomercials, there are a bunch of twists coming that will give you satisfaction. Turns out prosecutor Gosling isn't as dumb as he looks and Hanibal II isn't as smart as he looks. So guess what? They do find a way to try him for his crime after all.

Unfortunately, the two paragraphs above comprise the sum and substance of this really bad movie. I don't recall when this made its appearance at the theaters but it couldn't have made much of an indent. The action, what there is of it, is slow-moving, full of holes in its logic, and so predictable you'll figure it out in about a half-hour. The ending is one of Hollywood's greatest traps -- it does nothing more than set the ground for the sequel, which I'm sure was filmed same time they did this one.

Save your money, time and energy and pass on this dog. The alleged "humor" in the script isn't funny, either. People that confuse cynicism with humor don't have very good senses of humor and that's what you have to do to think any lines in "Fracture" are funny. April 13, 2008

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