REVIEW: Fracture

The movie Fracture stars Sir Anthony Hopkins and Best Actor Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling in a taut thriller directed by Gregory Hoblit.

Although the film did not get very good reviews on its initial release or perform very well at the box-office The Other Half and I still went to see Fracture (albeit at our favorite cheapskate second-run theater Regency Academy Cinema in Pasadena) earlier in the summer because he thinks Ryan Gosling is cute and I like to see Hopkins in just about anything.

Since the movie was released on DVD yesterday (with two alternate endings!) I thought I would put down my thoughts about this film.

It's definitely not a painfully bad movie, and for someone who lives in Los Angeles there's always a certain frisson as one recognizes the locations in the film the characters are going to as places that you have been to yourself. That being said, this is clearly a two-man show, with some very fun scenes between Hopkins' character, Ted Crawford, the older, rich, successful engineer who shoots his philandering young wife in the head and Gosling's character, a young, ambitious, handsome but somewhat stuck-up district attorney who gets the case dumped in his lapas his last case before he can jump to a high-power, lucrative private firm. The smaller parts are well-cast, with actors like Cliff Curtis, David Strathairn and Rosamund Pike.

It's definitely not a perfect movie. The plot relies unfairly on information that the audience couldn't reasonably know in order to "solve" the mystery. It's really unsurprising that the DVD contains at least two alternate endings, since really the story could have gone in multiple directions without much more suspension of belief fom the audience. In addition, the chemistry between Gosling and Pike is weak, at best. What's interesting is that Gosling must have been paired with the legendary Anthony Hopkins before his Oscar-nominated performance as a crack-smoking elementary school teacher in Half Nelson became widely known. His next appearance will be in Peter "Lord of the Rings" Jackson's film adaptation of Alice Sebold's celebrated first novel The Lovely Bones, as the father of the murdered child who is the center of the story.

Overall, if you go in with lowered expectations and appreciate the interactions between two actors firing on all cylinders, Fracture is a pleasantly diverting two hours.

GRADE: B.