Posted: 05/01/2007

Fracture

(2007)

by Lauren Sepanski

Remember when you were a kid and you’d come inside from playing for the night and your parents would be watching some movie they rented that you glanced at, didn’t understand, and looked pretty boring, so you just left? Fracture is one of those movies. There are no explosions, no chase scenes, no nude scenes, and no twist endings. It’s just a flat lawyer film with a pretty-boy main character and lots of scenes in a courtroom. It has been described as something out of a John Grisham novel, but this movie would better be described as a courtroom drama rather than a thriller. Only the actors are being held accountable for a bad story. Anthony Hopkins is a master of his art, as to be expected, and Ryan Gosling (who I feel is to blame for the attendance of any and all under-40 females to this film, including their sorry boyfriends, who paid for the thing), played a very convincing and easy-on-the-eyes lawyer. Would it have been so hard for director Gregory Hoblit (Frequency) to give me one shirt off, “contemplating the day” scene?

Anthony Hopkins (Silence of the Lambs) plays Ted Crawford, a man too smart for his own good, who discovers his wife is cheating on him with a police lieutenant. He then, patently, goes out of his way to murder them both. This takes about half of the film. Meanwhile, there are these long, drawn-out court scenes that could put a Red Bull addict to sleep. Gosling’s character, William Beachum, is a moderately successful junior lawyer with a chance to nab his dream position at the largest office in the city, but he soon becomes so obsessed with trying to figure out how Hopkins murdered his wife and her lover that he blows his chance at the position and loses both his girlfriend and his house in the hills. But in the end he sorts Hopkins’ whole plot; it’s just a shame that the audience figured things out about six scenes earlier.

The dialogue and plot left enough to be desired to choke off all hope of the viewer, the characters seemed to have forced quirks and hobbies (such as Ted Crawford’s interest in engineering), and the comic relief was scarce and only mildly amusing. I could have saved myself some time by just typing “boring” and left it at that. Therefore, being of sound mind and body (although I am entirely self-diagnosed), I cannot give this film a good rating. Sorry, Ryan. Tou should have taken your pants off… Maybe next time I can get you into my “half-nelson.” I will send you my cell number.

Lauren Sepanski is a filmmaker and film reviewer in Los Angeles.

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