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Fracture Running time 1:51 Rated PG-13 Parkway Pointe
There’s nothing wrong with jerking viewers in
one direction, then another — it’s what good mysteries do
— but Gregory Hoblit’s Fracture takes audiences to the breaking point of patience. The film
moves at a glacial pace; worse still, it shamelessly apes The Silence of the Lambs. The
comparisons are unavoidable, given that Sir Anthony Hopkins plays the
villain, a homicidal maniac and master manipulator named Ted Crawford. His
nemesis, Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling), is a young district attorney who isn’t an
intellectual match for the madman. There’s little doubt that Crawford is guilty of
murder — we see it committed in the film’s far-too-slow first
act — but the killer is clever: There are no witnesses, and
he’s successfully hidden the murder weapon. Beachum, the prosecutor,
can’t make what should be an open-and-shut case, and Crawford walks.
An embarrassed Beachum sets out to find out just how Crawford could get
away with murder and hopes to nab him on another charge. Once this cat-and-mouse game gets under way, the film
hits its stride. It really is great fun watching Hopkins here, and the
movie would have benefited greatly from more scenes with him and fewer
involving his co-star. Unfortunately, Gosling comes off as amateurish at
times, relying on so many physical tics and gestures that he singlehandedly
brings this affair to a screeching halt. Although it takes far too long to get to the
film’s requisite twist, credit must be given to writers Daniel Pyne
and Glenn Gers for coming up with a genuinely clever and plausible
explanation for the missing gun. However, by the time all of the pieces
came together I was far too distracted and bored to care — and I
couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been there, done that.
This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2007.
