Fracture
Even within the genre of trashy, hyper-masculine crime fiction, there's room for being interesting.
Indeed, one of the saving graces of bad art is that it often has the courage to take wild swings. I think of, for instance, Wild Things and the sheer joy with which it engaged in its many, many bacchanalian excesses, or of Red Sparrow, which fell prey to almost every cliché about cold war espionage writing, but still managed to fit in a couple interesting artistic flourishes here and there.
Bad art that is not even interesting has a spiritual emptiness to it. Not just because it fails at achieving what it sets out to do, but because you often feel like it didn't set out to do anything at all.
And this, of course, is how I feel about Fracture, a film that is not incompetent as much as it is spiritually empty. It was built (a verb I use deliberately) in 2007, but if it had come out today, this is the kind of production that would be accused of having been crafted at every step with an LLM. There is no single part of this film that will surprise you, and no part that won't disappoint you:
- The direction is schlocky and obvious without being painful.
- The script is serviceable without being interesting.
- The plot is exactly as silly and well-paved as you expect it will be 15 minutes into the film, if not sooner.
- Three weak performances by actors who I quite like but act as if they are in a simulacra of a more interesting film, sleep-walking through their roles with the requisite blank stares and artifice.
What gets to me more than anything else, though, is the ending, in which the writer and director do again exactly what you would expect: a vanilla resolution to events, lacking even the courage of cynicism or menace. (Primal Fear, for instance, while a better film in many ways besides, also was brave enough to feature an ending with finality and dread. They let the bad guy unambiguously win, because that is sometimes how life works.)
And you, as the viewer, are left with the sense of having spent two hours and not gained anything from it at all.