Fracture

Fracture is a film that entertains despite its flaws. Ordinarily, the cliched nature of its characters would have grated. But the quality of the acting saves the day. Anthony Hopkins plays the too-smart killer, Ted Crawford, with the gusto of a practiced egotist, while Ryan Gosling steals the show with his performance of the ambitious, over-achieving prosecutor Willy Beachum who, despite all odds, is ruled by an infatuation with Lady Justice.

The young lawyer decides to give up the perfect job and the perfect girlfriend in order to pursue the murderer beyond any reasonable hope of success. Crawford does his best to make the confrontation personal, a duel of titular intellects, a fight that he feels sure to win given that he’s a amoral genius engineer with a really sexy sports car. Still, it is difficult to believe Beachum would abandon his life-long pursuit of the American ideal of wealth and privilege. After all, he seemed quite willing to sleep with his future boss, which should have been the list of no-nos in his ethics course. Perhaps he missed that class hobnobbing with the other future corporate lawyers.

The other all-too-convenient plot point rests upon the contrivance that Crawford’s wife is having an affair with the local police’s hostage negotiator. Okay, he obviously designed his plan around that fact - it all hinged on the belief that this cop would be called in - and that was a rather large leap of faith for a meticulous killer to take.