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91The plot's many complications pretty much all add up, which is a rarity these days for a murder mystery. It's possible that audiences don't even care anymore if a film makes sense as long it's entertaining.
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90This hugely entertaining thriller is what's needed to banish a winter-long case of movie blues.
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83Fracture is working on us, playing us, but that's its pleasure. It makes overwrought manipulation seem more than a basic instinct.
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83Sneaks up on you. At first, it plays like it might be another in a long line of dullish legal thrillers. But then, in its modest, grown-up way, it keeps getting better and better.
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Gosling is 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.
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80The 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.
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75Just because a movie is freakin' preposterous doesn't mean it can't be diabolical fun. Case in point: Fracture.
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75Effective dialogue doesn't necessarily mean witty dialogue, but wit certainly helps, and you tend not to get much of it in a low-key legal thriller. Fracture is an exception.
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75The kind of thriller we've seen a thousand times before. Fortunately, nobody told leads, Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins, both of whom devoutly believe they're in another, better movie.
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75A stylish thriller so highly strung it zings, gives us Hopkins, an actor at the top of his game, in material that's only middling.
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75What audiences want when they go to a suspense thriller.
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75The best thing about Fracture is the way in which it defies genre cliches and turns all Hopkins' mannerisms into assets.
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75It's a provocative game that plays out with intelligence and wit.
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75Gruesomely engaging.
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75The delight here is in the sheer workmanship. The performances, the direction, the plotting, they're just nicely engineered, usually with an eye to that most underrated of virtues -- refined simplicity.
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75It's occasionally quite witty, it's able to tell us a great deal about its characters and their back stories in an economic fashion and its plot swings are surprising and compelling.
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75Not since Lecter has a role been this well suited to Hopkins, whose intelligence and pristine formality as an actor often make him seem alien--or worse, an incorrigible ham.
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70The movie entertains, but it's a shallow entertainment where you have no rooting interest in the outcome.
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70What makes Fracture hum is the way Hopkins bares his teeth, twitches his nostrils, and trains his shiny pinprick Lecter eyes on his co-star.
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70It boils down to experience's arrogance, intellect and wealth versus youth's cockiness, resilience and hard work, and the actors appear to have a good time playing the game.
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70The screenwriters, Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers, hit the customary thriller notes with a touch of humor, and the director, Gregory Hoblit (who worked similar terrain in "Primal Fear"), arranges those notes into a catchy, insistent rhythm.
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70An absorbing legal thriller that can't help but taste like exquisitely reheated leftovers.
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70The chief pleasure in the picture (set in Los Angeles) is in watching Hopkins spin off another of his nutty self-possessed intellectual criminals--this time it's Hannibal Lecter lite.
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67In the dark of the theatre Fracture keeps it together – mainly through the sheer will of Hopkins and Gosling.
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67There's more than a trace of James Dean in Gosling, except that he's a rebel with a cause.
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63This is a slickly entertaining package, beautifully photographed on well-chosen locations with an unerring sense of pace by Gregory Hoblit.
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63Those who still relish the sight of Anthony Hopkins portraying an evil criminal mastermind will get the most out of Fracture, which is not so much a whodunit -- we see Hopkins' character putting a bullet in his wife's head in the movie's first few minutes -- as a howdunnit.
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60The two leads are on fine form, but the surrounding structure is too familiar from a thousand other films. Still, tense and occasionally twisty stuff.
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60Anyone who can credibly threaten to steal a movie from Anthony Hopkins has seriously got it going on. Fracture may be remembered as the movie that brought Ryan Gosling into the mainstream.
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50A momentary diversion.
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50You needn't actually see Fracture to know that if the charge is acting that winks, these two are guilty.
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50Fracture may be smarter than the majority of movies out there, but it's not half as clever as it thinks it is.
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50The picture is clever, somber, quiet: There's just no reason it has to be as deadly boring as it is.
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50It renders passion dispassionate and turns murder into a kind of fashion statement, something we observe without really caring about.
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50The good part about this okay, but way less than great, thriller is that you won't notice how cheesy it is until the heartburn from the popcorn has eased. In these jaded times, that's a bargain.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 28 out of 36
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Mixed: 4 out of 36
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Negative: 4 out of 36
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JayC.9