Fracture

Something about the movie Fracture bothered me. The legal procedures didn’t seem like they were right. Unsurprisingly, Eugene Volokh does a better job than I could have explaining them. Two issues half-remembered from my criminal law class just didn’t sit right with me, and Prof. Volokh really hits it on the head.

Obviously, don’t follow the Volokh link if you don’t want the spoilers.

Oh, and I didn’t buy the romance in the “B” plot, either, but that’s a different complaint; I rarely buy movie romances. Aside from that, Anthony Hopkins is at his fiendish best; he’s not quite Hannibal Lechter but still definitely intelligent, manipulative, and evil, and therefore immensely entertaining. And the movie gets its Los Angeles geography pretty much right; the interiors of the D.A.’s office and the courthouse are not like reality but the locations are all in areas where I would have expected the kinds of activities going on to have taken place, right down to the location of the parking lots the characters use. Ryan Gosling makes a credible and good-looking cocky young attorney with an obliquely-referenced southern drawl, and we are treated to a too-brief glimpse of the radiant Embeth Davidtz.

So on the whole, I liked the movie, despite the narrative and legal flaws. It’s a good story, and a nice bit of suspense to get the summer movie season started.