Film Reviews

Fracture

• Rating:
• Director: Gregory Hoblit
• Starring: Anthony Hopkins
• Details: US / 111mins (15A).

An old-fashioned thriller, Fracture, after an inspired opening and elongated middle act, really shines in the last third and is saved from being an also-ran. Desperate and enraged when he discovers his beautiful trophy wife Jennifer (Embeth Davidtz) is having an affair, rational engineer Ted Crawford (Hopkins) plans her perfect murder - with a twist. Although she miraculously survives the shooting, ending up in a coma, Ted waits for her lover - Detective Rob Nunally (Billy Burke) - to arrive on the scene, only to confess to the crime. However, it's hard to pin anything on him, as assistant DA Willy Beachum (Gosling) days away from securing a highly paid corporate gig, finds out. Hoblit delivered something different for a courtroom drama in Primal Fear, and does it again for the psychological thriller here - even though it sometimes veers from the beautiful mind games it loves to indulge in, to include a romantic angle for Beachum. Hopkins does his quiet psycho thing that we've come to expect from him in this kind of role, but this time he steps back to allow Gosling more room to manoeuvre and improve on the promise he showed in the recent Half Nelson.

Review by Gavin Burke