I expected a lot from this movie, and it didn't deliver.<br /><br />The plot, worth a B- in a scriptwriting class, pitted the complex villain played by Anthony Hopkins vs. all the one-dimensional good guys.<br /><br />I wonder, where were the viewer's sympathies supposed to lie? Mine were with the villain. Because Mr. Hopkins was the best actor? Perhaps. But perhaps moreso because his character was the best drawn, the smartest, and the most emotionally complex.<br /><br />Before he shoots his wife, who has just returned home from a weekend's assignation with her lover (who later turns up as the policeman dispatched to the house as a hostage negotiator), Hopkins' character tells her he loves her. She, cold as ice, tells him, "I know." Her lover, in the scene just before, had just told her pretty much the same thing, and her response had been equally cold.<br /><br />So, I had no sympathy for her.<br /><br />Her policeman/lover is cheating on his own wife and kids, responds unprofessionally at the scene of the crime and by taking Hopkins' confession despite blatant conflict of interest, and later plants fake evidence. He came off less as a distraught lover than an unscrupulous and incompetent sleaze.<br /><br />I felt no sympathy for him, either.<br /><br />And then there is Beachum, the lawyer: smug, conniving and ambitious. The best that can be said for him is that he refuses to take the bait of the faked evidence.<br /><br />But he seemed much less smart than he thought he was, and so I wasted no sympathy on the lawyer, either.<br /><br />Hopkins' was the character I was rooting for because Hopkins' was the only character with any depth, with more than a single dimension.<br /><br />I wanted to see him prevail and was extremely disappointed when he did not.<br /><br />And I don't usually side with the bad guys. I never sided with Mr. Hopkins' Hannibal the cannibal, for example. And I don't see the similarities that some reviewers do between that role and the one he plays in this film. I believe that if his wife had said she loved him, or seemed in any way conflicted, he would not have shot her. <br /><br />No, I only side with the bad guys when their motivations are actually honorable, for this truly was a matter of "honor" in an old-fashioned sense, and/or when the good guys are no more than cardboard cutouts.<br /><br />All in all, Fracture was nowhere near as well written or as satisfying as an episode of Law and Order.<br /><br />But it's a huge credit to Mr. Hopkins that he did not simply phone in his performance in this film as Sam Waterson so often does on L&O. Hopkins, in fact, turned in a much better performance than the material deserved.<br /><br />I give it six stars only because of the talented Mr. Hopkins. Leave out his performance, and it merits only three.