Fracture: Critic Reviews

Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling are electrifying in Gregory Hoblit's otherwise mediocre thriller.

It may be obvious that Fracture is working on us, playing us, but that's its pleasure. It makes overwrought manipulation seem more than a basic instinct.

The glib entertainment Fracture offers an assortment of tasty treats, notably the spectacle of that crafty scene stealer Anthony Hopkins mixing it up with that equally cunning screen nibbler Ryan Gosling.

Here is a big, handsome shyster of a legal thriller, pleading with the viewer to stick with its preposterous twists and turns on the guarantee that the crowning revelation will blow our socks off. In this, as in all things, the film is not to be trusted.

A provocative game that plays out with intelligence and wit.

As a vehicle for two fine actors, Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling, it's at its best.

The movie seems so content to be smarter than you're expecting that it never amounts to more than a talky tease. What's breezy about the first half of the picture turns logy in the second.

[Gosling's] the kind of actor who makes other actors look lazy. He is Brando at the time of Streetcar, or Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, and altogether one of the more remarkable happenings at the movies today.

Although Hopkins could surely portray a charismatic killer in his sleep by now, he's clearly having a ball, while Gosling, gliding through every scene with deceptively casual confidence, seems determined to prove himself the best actor of his generation.

This hugely entertaining thriller is what's needed to banish a winter-long case of movie blues.

The movie's logic fails at the end -- it betrays a criminal blind spot in its reasoning -- but you're best off not subjecting it to any prolonged analysis. Don't think. Just watch.

Fracture is no Silence of the Lambs. In fact, it's no Primal Fear. Anthony Hopkins may well be smarter than all of us put together, but his busy career sometimes has more breadth than wit.

What makes Fracture hum is the way Hopkins bares his teeth, twitches his nostrils, and trains his shiny pinprick Lecter eyes on his co-star.

Smart, fast-paced and intriguing. Not a perfect film, but a perfectly entertaining one.

The strengths of director Gregory Hoblit's drama may well have nothing to do with what gets gets filmgoers off the couch and into the multiplex.

The main interest here is the juxtaposing of Gosling's Method acting with Hopkins's more classical style, a spectacle even more mesmerizing than the settings.

Fracture, a stylish thriller so highly strung it zings, gives us Hopkins, an actor at the top of his game, in material that's only middling.

Powerfully acted and tightly plotted, Fracture is solid entertainment.

Director Gregory Hoblit can't seem to find any real heart in this story.

An exceptionally suspenseful nail-biter.

An open-and-shut case becomes an elegantly framed battle of wits in Fracture, an absorbing legal thriller.

Fracture breaks no new ground, but with [Gosling and Hopkins] around, you'll never be bored.

An entertaining battle of wills and styles.

Gosling is both amazing and adrift in this almost thoroughly forgettable upscale legal drama and you're left praying that the stardom so surely coming his way doesn't come with a Hopkins clause attached.

Fracture is the kind of polished cat-and-mouse movie thriller that depends entirely on the cat and the mouse having read and agreed to the script in advance.