'Fracture' (R)(out of four)

It's worth taking a moment to consider the failure that is "Fracture" -- and everything that's missing from what was promised.

Where's that spark of maniacal charm from Hopkins? Where's the fear and allure? Where are the sparks in confrontations?

Which is not to say "Fracture" lacks any head-to-head moments to remember; to the contrary, the film has two captivating moments of back-and-forth, between prosecutor and perpetrator, between Mr.charisma and Mr.crazy, and between the buzz-cut and the bald man. They are juicy moments, brimming with tension and suspense, where we wait in almost a Marlon Brando state of awe, watching every fleck of an eyebrow and twitch of a lip. Yet these are only two, woefully brief sequences in a film so broken -- so dismally adrift and aimless -- that one naturally has to question the basic skills of the team that assembled the thing. "Fracture" is an appropriate title, for this movie is a filmmaking schism, caught somewhere between a comedy, courtroom drama, personal melodrama and murder thriller.

Things start on an even keel, offering no hint of the dysfunction that will quickly consume the production. Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling) is a public prosecutor, the young hotshot in the DA's office who we meet on the day his promotion is announced; he's moving up in the world, out of public service and into the city's biggest and baddest private law firm. He's got a conscience, sure, but he's also got student loans -- and an invitation to quit his current line of work for a big and better payday.

His old boss (David Strathairn) warns him not to quit, but Willy's meeting with his new boss (Rosamund Pike) convinces him otherwise -- a casual, late-night introduction to a blonde who eyes him up immediately and is soon inviting him home to meet the folks for Thanksgiving.

But before he leaves to decorate his corner office at his new job, there's one last case waiting for Willy -- a simple one, he's told, complete with a signed confession from the distraught husband who was found over the bloody body of a dying wife.

Just go and take a plea, he's told, but when Willy finally shows up to court, he's ntroduced to Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins) for the first time, a soft-spoken man with an occasional Irish accent who pleads not guilty to the judge, waves his right to an attorney and announces he will stipulate to the state's charges if he can argue his case now, immediately, with Willy as the prosecutor.

And so the stage is set for a courtroom drama that promises to let Hopkins be Hopkins -- to allow him to play the bad guy at the card table who already seems to know every card in the deck. It's the formula that made him so irresistible in his Oscar-winning turn in "Silence of the Lambs," where he was presented as the serial killer who attacked less with the knife than the brain.

He didn't have to move a muscle; it was his mind that was scary.

Such is Hopkins' depiction of Ted Crawford, who ignores the court proceedings as he scribbles doodles on a legal pad. He's either crazy or brilliant, and as we start to realize that Crawford's confession was procured under illegal circumstances, and that his wife's body isn't accompanied by a murder weapon, the tables start to turn -- perhaps a bit too quickly.

If the first third of "Fracture" is about a tantalizing court case, and the last 10 minutes or so is about a final comeuppance, the middle hour is nothing but a Hopkins-less train wreck, derailing into absurd tangents before crashing, splitting, and burning on screen for all to see. Scene by scene, the drama changes, first preoccupied with Willy's inner turmoil over abandoning the public good for his prestigious private job, then tossing in a sudden love affair, a side story in which a distraught detective seeks to tamper with case evidence, and an intensive care subplot involving Crawford's comatose wife.

Gone is the smart dialogue that opened the film, which elevated Willy and Ted's first standoff. Characters start saying blunt and awkward things, the story shifts quickly into awkward scenarios that rush by in a blur -- Thanksgiving dinner with the family! -- and it genuinely feels as if an entire reel is missing from the movie (the reel that explains Willy's erratic, inexplicable decline from arrogant to apoplectic, from confident to catatonic).

No longer grounded by a solid characters or logical storylines, we turn instead to the realm of humor, and find some release in Mr. Gosling's often giddy delivery. Much as director Gregory Hoblit proved with Edward Norton in "Primal Fear," he knows how to pick talent. When he's not losing grasp over "Fracture's" trajectory, he helps us to see in Mr. Gosling much the same energy that came through in the romantic "The Notebook" and the heartbreaking "Half Nelson."

"Fracture" has no business being this confused, nor this bad; it simply runs out of things for these two brilliant actors to do.