Anybody here seen a crime drama? I don’t know, maybe like “A Few Good Men” or any episode of “CSI”? How about Anthony Hopkins as a cold and calculating serial killer? “Silence of the Lambs,” anyone? Throw in a young hotshot DA (we haven’t seen that character before of course), a “foolproof” case that isn’t quite so foolproof, and a romantic subplot, and you have an easy recipe for an incredibly generic film. You don’t have to see “Fracture,” because you already have.
Ted Crawford (Hopkins) is a wealthy aeronautics engineer who decides that a bullet to the head is the best way to stop his wife’s cheating ways. After he is found by the hostage negotiator still holding the gun and openly confesses, it appears to be an open-and-shut case. However, when cocksure prosecutor Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling) is assigned to the case, his hubris sets him up for a hard fall as he soon discovers that the quick and easy case is much more complicated. Trying to salvage his reputation, Beachum falls into a cat-and-mouse game with the ruthless and composed Crawford.
Doesn’t this sound pretty familiar? TV shows like “CSI,” “House” or “Law and Order” do this all the time. The case looks obvious (and the main character states that), complications arise, and then at the last moment the hero figures out a solution.
However, this is no hour-long-with-commercial-breaks television show, but a two-hour long movie. This leads to unfortunate padding with subplots such as Beachum’s problems with his upcoming transition to a lucrative corporate firm (which would of course be jeopardized if he lost the case), and a ho-hum romantic subplot with his new boss Nikki Gardner (Rosamund Pike). It would have been nice if these subplots were fleshed out more, but they’re only used for Beachum’s character development and are summarily dropped once their usefulness is up. This is especially problematic because despite these subplots, Beachum’s changes make little sense when his character arc for the whole film is examined.
Of course Hopkins is good, and Gosling has good acting chops and relishes the cocky Beachum, but good acting is only a pillar of a film, not the whole shebang. Actually, in the movie’s defense, it probably would have been a great “very special episode” of one of the aforementioned shows. The scenes that pair Hopkins and Gosling are great, as Crawford obviously enjoys mocking the brash and irked Beachum, but these scenes are unfortunately few and far between. The extra scenes only serve to bog down the story, and especially when the audience figures out the twist (and a fair amount will have the solution halfway through the movie), it just seems to drag on and on as you wait for the young lawyer to catch up.
If you are ecstatic at seeing Hannibal Lecter sans cannibalism, or are obsessive about the works of Ryan Gosling, you could do worse than “Fracture.” However, if an hour long crime TV show is already pushing the limit for you, “Fracture” isn’t going to offer much new in its two-hour timeframe.
Grade: B-
