Fracture
Relish. Thatās something that every great actor whoās ever played a great villain has displayed in spades, particularly in those evil roles that have become iconic. Anthony Hopkins had the market cornered on it way back when he played the notorious Hannibal Lecter and picked himself up an Oscar doing so. And now here in this 2007 release, Hopkins has come back for seconds, playing a brilliant engineer and psychopath who plays like a combo platter of Lecter and O.J. Simpson, a cuckolded husband who blatantly shoots his wife down in cold blood, and then, while acting as his own attorney during the trial, literally challenges the prosecution to put the evidence together to convict him. Unfortunately, we get Ryan Gosling as the cocky young Deputy DA pitted against him matching wits, and frankly, Gosling is just not up to the task, displaying neither the inner strength nor charisma that Jodie Foster had prior, and what we have is a very so so courtroom thriller that allows the viewer to revel in Hopkinsā delicious and vindictive evil but nonetheless forces us to accept the fact that Gosling is really the lead character, as the story portrays him as someone with one foot out the door at the District Attorneyās office and getting ready to transition into a cushy corporate lawyer job at an international law firm, all the while getting sexually involved with his gorgeous future boss to be (Rosamund Pike), even as it turns out that Hopkinsā cunning in what should be an open and shut case threatens his future due to the public embarrassment of losing a conviction to an untrained defendant acting as his own counsel. Indeed, the entire subplot of his setting up at the new firm and his relationship with Pike serve merely as a distraction from the main story, if but to make a hamfisted point that he is better off as a crusader putting bad guys away than to do the bidding of various billionaires and such. Eventually, when it comes to the point that Hopkins has managed to disqualify all the damning evidence against him, Goslingās case comes to a standstill as he desperately roots around looking for something else he can pin on him, and so does the movie itself, turning into a meandering mess that goes completely nowhere for an extended period of time until Gosling just about gives up on the case as well as his career, allowing Hopkins to go free until the ātwistā ending where basically the Double Jeopardy rule is completely subverted. In other roles we have David Straithairn as Goslingās DA boss trying to do damage control to the unraveling mess; Embeth Davidtz as the unlucky wife along with Billy Burke (wimpy dad from Twilight) as her illegitimate beau (who also happens to be the cop who arrested Hopkins, by his own design); Cliff Curtis as the bumbling, mostly useless cop on the case; and best of all Bob Gunton as Pikeās father who has Gosling over to his house for Thanksgiving and gets perhaps the best piece of acting in the movie. In the end though, this essentially marks a retread of familiar territory for Sir Anthony, albeit with a script, story, and co-star thatās simply not up for the challengeā¦
5/10