‘Fracture’ is a throwback to the sort of courtroom thrillers, with double crossing and twists in the tale, that Hollywood was adept at making back in the 1990s, and for the most part it is a winning formula. Films like this don’t really have a great social message. They are self-contained tales of rich people who resort to murder and duplicity in order to get their way, but it works pricelessly as a cat-and-mouse game involving a millionaire aeronautical engineer whose younger wife is having an affair with the police officer who ends up being the first to see her after her attempted murder, and even takes the confession of the culprit, which ends up being inadmissible in court, resulting in what seems at first a cut and dried case turning into something far less straightforward.

Anthony Hopkins chews up the scenery and the rest of the cast in a role he could frankly have phoned in while asleep, but this is an effective thriller which turns textbook legal scenarios into a riveting, sometimes erotic, thriller where the culprit uses his seemingly obvious guilt into a legal quagmire where it is the very fact that his guilt is assumed and presumed to be beyond reproach that holes start to appear in the evidence. And it causes the hotshot lawyer prosecuting him, who has a 97% success rate in trials, to have a crisis of faith when he realizes he has met his match in the defendant who acts as his own attorney and is always one step ahead of him. If it weren’t for the battle of the wills between Hopkins and Ryan Gosling this would be quite a humdrum affair, the likes of which we have seen before in the likes of Gregory Hoblit’s similarly structured ‘Primal Fear’ and ‘Fallen’ which rely on eleventh hour twists.

Hopkins relishes the opportunity to wink at the judge, cause persons of interest in the case to get humiliated in court, at which point they hurl themselves over the witness stand to fight with the defendant, and it is preposterous moments like this which, while entertaining, somewhat undermine the efficacy of the tale that is being told. It also relies on Hopkins having calculated every possible scenario that could play out in a way that isn’t exactly plausible, especially when he could not have anticipated exactly who would have been assigned to the case and how their personality could be so calibrated that they would fall so impeccably for the machinations that Hopkins has devised. But this is never to be taken seriously. It is a burlesque, theatrical sleight of hand, and in that respect it works splendidly.