Fracture
Jennifer Crawford (Embeth Davidtz) has already had a long day of hotel sex with her illicit lover when her husband, an aeronautics engineer named Ted (Anthony Hopkins), corners her into a honey-we-need-to-talk discussion. "I don't think I can do one of these tonight," she says wearily, "one of these" apparently being an intense, unwinnable conversation relating to Ted's emotional neediness. Ted says he loves her; she clearly does not love him back. She loves Rob Nunnally (Billy Burke), her cop boyfriend, and Ted knows about the affair. So Ted shoots her in the head. Many a film has ended there, but "Fracture," a tauntingly clever cat-and-mouse thriller, uses it as the jumping-off point. Ted the engineer has engineered an elaborate scheme. He knew it would be his wife's lover who would come to the house to arrest him after the gardener heard shots fired, and he knew the fact that the arresting officer was sleeping with the victim would screw things up in court. He's also worked out a very neat trick: Somehow, Ted's gun, the one he shot Jennifer with, the one that was taken from him when he was arrested -- somehow, ballistics reports indicate that gun has never been fired. What at first appeared to be an open-and-shut case for a cocky, up-and-coming deputy district attorney named Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling) has now turned into a headache. Jennifer is in a coma (an apparent snag in her husband's plan; he wanted her dead) and can't testify to what happened. The attempted-murder weapon was apparently not the weapon after all, but the cops can't find any other guns in the house, and they know Ted never left after he fired the shots.
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