Fracture

One of the best ways to gauge the dullness of a movie is when it's easier to focus more on the product placement than on the story.

"Fracture" is just such a movie.

Marketed as a legal thriller about the perfect murder, "Fracture" is actually a somnolescent drama about a hyperintelligent psycho (Anthony Hopkins - who else?) who goes mano-a-mano with a stud prosecutor (Ryan Gosling) with a 97% conviction rate.

Gosling's character, Willy Beachum, is on the fast track to junior partnership in a ritzy L.A. law firm, but gets sidetracked by an attempted homicide case that seems like a slam-dunk. The police have a signed a confession from Hopkins's Ted Crawford - a shady millionaire engineer - and it looks like a simple guilt-and-conviction quickie.

As the movie's trailers make clear, Crawford has very deliberately shot his wife in the head for her repeated infidelities with - surprise! - the hostage negotiator (Billy Burke) who later attended to his arrest. Thanks to the negotiator's intimidating presence during his questioning, Crawford successfully gets the confession thrown out, leaving Beachum with precious little evidence to present to the court.

Following that bombshell, "Fracture" doesn't offer any more twists than an average episode of "Law and Order." Gosling wanders around for what seems like forever, searching for evidence that he can't find, while Hopkins makes taunting phone calls to his home and office. There's a ponderous love story with a senior partner in Beachum's future employer and ethical crises of conscience, both of which which gives director Gregory Hoblit plenty of time to shoot mini-commercials featuring Spint cell phones and Macintosh computers.

On the plus side, the script, by Daniel Pyne and Glen Gers, gives Hopkins a gleeful chance to ham it up, which provides blessed slivers of comic relief and the picture's best dialogue. Hopkins isn't taking this sucker seriously, and he exposes the ponderous Gosling as a talentless blank; he's one of the few Hollywood actors who can get upstaged by a laptop.

But the ending...dear Lord, the ending. I'm not hesitant to give away plot points for stinkers like "Fracture," but explaining its denouement would render such disbelief, dear reader, that I'd have to take the blame for you smashing the computer monitor you're looking at right now. Suffice it to say that the movie simply stops dead in its tracks: It's as if Hoblit realized that he'd taken almost 2 hours on a TV-movie story and immediately pulled the plug to avoid further embarrassment.

Forget the movie's murder victim: The true injured parties are Sprint and Apple, which paid a king's ransom to be associated with this crappy dirge. Right now their marketing departments have to be scratching their heads in disbelief - they may as well have cross-promoted with Halliburton.

Rating: **