Fracture Review

Anthony Hopkins spends this film enjoying himself, which is both the pleasure and the limit of it. As Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer who shoots his wife and then defends himself in court, he purrs through an accent of his own invention and builds marble run sculptures in a glass house, a metaphor the movie is pleased to point at twice.

Gosling plays the prosecutor as a young man with too much hair product and too little doubt, and their early scenes work because Willy cannot tell whether he is being outthought or flattered. Gregory Hoblit directs cleanly, Kramer Morgenthau keeps downtown Los Angeles cold and glassy, and the courtroom material moves. The trouble is the puzzle at the center.

The case turns on a weapon swap that requires a detective, a prosecutor and a crime lab to be careless in exactly the right order, and the ending leans on a double jeopardy technicality the script explains twice and still fudges. Rosamund Pike is given a corner office and a decorative romance. The late realisation that the murder weapon was the detective's own gun is good plotting, but Willy arrives at it by staring at a photograph until it tells him.