There’s nothing quite as good as when Anthony Hopkins plays bad.
From his film debut as a patricidal warrior in 1968’s “The Lion in Winter” to slurping down fava beans as his most famous character in his later career, the wily Welshman practically twinkles with delight when he sinks his considerable acting chops into a villain like the calculating white-collar wife-killer Ted Crawford in today’s legal thriller “Fracture.”
Director Gregory Hoblit is best known for discovering Edward Norton for his introductory tour de force in “Primal Fear.” He finds another intense young foil with the mesmerizing Ryan Gosling (“The Notebook”), this time to go mano-a-mano against the titan Hopkins. So even though a sometimes pedestrian script by Daniel Pyne (“The Sum of All Fears”) and Glenn Gers depends on some annoying stretches of legal and character logic, Hoblit’s able direction and his emphasis on the thespian fireworks raises the proceedings beyond their raw material.
Ted Crawford is a cuckold, a meticulous aeronautics executive who has discovered his wife’s affair and sets out to get away with her murder. Gosling is Willy Beachum, a cocky and ambitious assistant district attorney from the wrong side of the tracks who has made his bones in Los Angeles. He has a winning record and a lucrative new job about to start in the private sector at a high-prestige law firm. But his future prospects are soon put in jeopardy when he’s assigned a last job as a public servant, to put away Crawford for his crime. Soon an unexpected streak of idealism for justice will emerge in him.
What seems at first to be an easy conviction turns complicated as Crawford gleefully allows his elaborate courtroom plan to play out. The linchpin to that plan is the movie’s chief flaw of coincidence and assumption. It depends on the fact that the cheating wife’s lover (Billy Burke) is the police detective called on the Crawford case and that the cop will try to hide the affair even after Crawford’s arrest for attempted homicide. Now how could the bad guy really anticipate that?
But these plot machinations are merely a showcase. Like fun previous cat-and-mouse thrillers of adultery and murder, 1972’s “Sleuth” (with an elder Lawrence Olivier and emerging Michael Caine) and 1982’s “Deathtrap” (with a mature Caine and young Christopher Reeve), this is a two-hand revel as the acting torch is passed from one generation to the next. Thanks to Gosling and especially Hopkins, “Fracture” rarely seems broken.
‘Fracture’
4/5 stars
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling, David Strathairn
Director: Gregory Hoblit
Rated R for language and some violent content
