

He takes on Crawford's case rather carelessly, convinced that it's an open-and-shut case with ironclad evidence-so he's taken completely by surprise when all the evidence gets yanked out from under him.
#Anthony hopkins murder movie full
He drives to the hospital at full speed, but he arrives just too late to save her. As Crawford is going to remove his wife Jennifer's life support, Beachum receives a court order barring Crawford to do so.

Beachum sees his life crash around him due to his own hubris and a murderer walks free, as he desperately tries to find another way to put Crawford behind bars. On top of that, the murder weapon turns out to be useless due to a clever switcheroo that Crawford performed during the arrest. However, Crawford elects to represent himself at his own trial, and soon presents evidence which reveals that the cop who arrested and interrogated Crawford was screwing his wife behind his back, making Crawford's signed confession inadmissable in court as fruit of the poisonous tree since it was obtained under duress. When the case is presented to deputy district attorney William Beachum (Gosling), who is about to leave his job as a public prosecutor for a high-profile post at a respected legal firm, the case looks like a clear slam-and-dunk with a murder weapon and a signed confession, and the confident Beachum barely investigates the case. The wife survives but remains in a coma, while Crawford is charged with attempted murder. He orchestrates her murder and arranges to be arrested by the same cop whom his wife was having an affair with. Ted Crawford (Hopkins) is a brilliant and wealthy aeronautical engineer who discovers that his wife, Jennifer, is having an affair. Add to that the fact that Hopkins and Pacino share only the briefest of scenes and that title starts to feel like a damning verdict, hidden in plain sight.Fracture" is a 2007 thriller, directed by Gregory Hoblit and starring Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. What’s more, later scenes - in a desperate bid to raise the stakes - show a depressing propensity for doling out physical cruelty to female characters and, as the whole thing flails to an unintentionally hilarious conclusion nicked from Gone Girl, Shimosawa’s camera never ceases its odd habit of tilting and sliding like a distracted drunk. But first time director Shintaro Shimosawa can’t locate a consistent tone or marshal the deepening violent mystery. The obtrusive score - all jagged violins and sinister percussion - perhaps points to the overheated, knowing noir Misconduct hoped to be. When it isn’t ticking off implausible twists a telenovela writer would dismiss as too far-fetched, the script is weighed down by huge dumps of exposition and head-in-hands first-draft clunkers (“Be as calm as ice,” advises a detective at one point). So, yeah, not a bad framework for a mash-up of a Grisham-esque potboiler and a Fatal Attraction-style thriller. Briskly plotted early scenes introduce us to Arthur Denning (Hopkins with a slick of white hair and almost Trumpian hauteur) - an impossibly wealthy pharmaceutical boss weathering a storm of allegations about the grisly side effects of his products and also dealing with the apparent kidnap of his young girlfriend Emily (Malin Akerman).Ī flashback then reveals that, before her disappearance, Emily had handed information about Denning to her ex-boyfriend Ben Cahill (Duhamel, sporting a crinkled brow and able to speak only in plot-clarifying questions), a hotly ambitious lawyer hoping to both please his boss Charles Abrams (Pacino, all Bayou courtliness and expensive tailoring) and also stay faithful to his wife Charlotte (Alice Eve, not quite selling the emotional bruises of a recent trauma).

At some stage there may have been the ghost of a decent premise here.Īt some stage there may have been the ghost of a decent premise here.
