Remember the Fractured Fairy Tales from the Bullwinkle Show? Well, if you do, linger on that thought for a few moments and you'll garner far more pleasure than if you drive to the megaplex and watch the newest incarnation of Hannibal Lecter, aeronautical engineer, taking on one of the new kidz, Ryan Gosling, doing his twitchy Diane Keatonish imitation of Steve McQueen as Bullitt, but without the action.<br /><br />In fact, the movie is devoid of any action at all that isn't not only predictable, but juvenile. This movie never reaches above the Weekly Reader level in terms of plot, characterization, motivation or devices. Five minutes into the movie, I knew the Big Secret. Ten minutes in, I knew this was going to be a long slow ride with no bumps or fresh air. It's a flaccid copy of Jagged Edge, but without the jagged edges. It's the Postman Rings Once, Then Walks Away. Even the big visual motif of the rolling ball machine is never explored satisfactorily. We see a sidelong image of a ramp, then parts of a wheel, but never get to see the ball do anything worth watching. Kind of like a Goldberg machine constructed by Rube's untalented brother Fredo.<br /><br />The backstories of Hannibal and Diane are inane and tired at best. Hopkins plays an engineer whose wife is carrying on with a cop in such a manner to facilitate his revenge fantasy. In fact, the very basis of this fantasy is fantastic, and I don't mean that in the good sense. It's beyond belief. So many coincidental states of being are piled into a heap at the beginning of this fifth-grade writing exercise that one more would cause the entire mess to break through to the basement where the nursery school kids are studying Grimm. Example One: the cop is a hostage negotiator assigned to the district where Hopkins lives. Example Two: the wife and cop don't know each other's last names. Example three: the cop leaves his gun lying around when he plays with the wife.<br /><br />Gosling is conveniently trying to leave the prosecutor's office and join a corporate law firm, which adds bulk to the movie as pulp is added to orange juice. It's supposed to be good for you, but isn't really very pleasant. The loose plot threads this allows to be picked up are so nebulous that the cloth is in danger of ripping through at the slightest pressure like flimsy truck-stop toilet paper, giving the film-goer a nasty case of brownfinger.<br /><br />Facilitating the plot mangle are such miserable devices as these: when the wife is shot in the face with a Glock .45, she doesn't die; the homicide detective and Gosling happen to use the same model cell phone (which triggers the lamest Eureka moment in the history of cinema); Gosling spills coffee on his suit right after his tux is delivered for the party he's suddenly invited to that happens to be at the Disney Center and this all allows Hopkins to suddenly divine Gosling's "point of fracture," from which the movie takes its name (and makes no sense), like the "tell" scenes in Rounders and Casino Royale; and finally Hopkins, devilishly clever and brutal, happens to need to talk a lot for some reason.<br /><br />I could go on and on, taking perverse pleasure from dissing this awful movie with great production values, but that would allow it to take up too much of my time, and it's done enough of that already in the mere watching. I thought Grindhouse was a hoot but not worth another attendance, being a concatenation of two lousy movies in an amusing fashion, but I'd rather sit through three hours of that movie a second time than watch this one for the first.<br /><br />I'll end on this note -- Fracture would be a modest movie of the week on television if this were still the 80s. It could be an episode of Murder, She Wrote. It could star Raymond Burr and be popular among older viewers. But it can't be a good movie in 2007. Why it's being so well reviewed is not really a mystery to me, just a disappointment. Even the Hill Street cameo in Fracture is pointless and unsatisfying. The best part of the experience was watching the trailer for the remake of Hairspray with John Travolta taking Divine's role as Edna Turnblad, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Velma von Tussle. Now that's going to be a movie worth watching.