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I can’t remember when I last last one-–maybe that Sidney Lumet disaster with Vin Diesel–but courtroom dramas have a big advantage: nobody in the audience really knows anything about the law. So, as far as plot twists are concerned, anything goes. That’s pretty much the story with Fracture, although we don’t see much of the courtroom.

Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins) is a rich genius mechanic who finds out that his wife is cheating on him. What he does is “almost” kill her–she ends up in a coma, meaning she’s practically alive–and then “almost” gets caught, since the attempted-murder-weapon seems to be gone. That’s the riddle that Willy Beacham (Ryan Gosling) must solve just a few days before leaving public office for a career in the private law field. Gosling’s character has a reputation of almost never losing a case, he’s a winner and that’s his biggest weakness. When Ted challenges him he must call ‘em or fold ‘em…

The movie has three great assets. Two of them are Gosling and Hopkins. They both perform in a great way as they match wits; the disturbed mastermind and the cocky, sharp prosecutor. The problem is we don’t see them together on screen enough.

A lot of movie time is spent on profiling Gosling and Hopkins’ characters when it’s more than obvious what kind of people they probably are from the start. We see a lot of Beacham until the two first meet, plus an irrelevant romance with Beacham’s future boss, Nikki Gardner (Rosamund Pike). It’s distracting and probably works against the film’s flow towards the showdown and the twist.

Another asset is the dialogue. It’s rare that a serious movie like this has so many humorous moments, mostly ironic and some of the greatest one-liners thrown in a single film. Beacham and Crawford share most of those moments with Billy Burke’s Rob Nunully and David Strathairn’s Joe Lobruto, stealing a couple for themselves. This is the only truly fun part of Fracture, which is ultimately a typical case of a movie that could have been good but isn’t. (Even the scriptwriters seem to acknowledge this, since the plot is very loose and implausible.) The first twist in the middle of the film and the moral dilemmas that crop up are very convenient and equally underscripted.

In the end Fracture‘s creators just push everything to be conventional as though having fun isn’t enough for the audience, but we have to root for the good guy also. That’s not the most charming way to go in contemporary storytelling, especially when you rush it like this film does. I think the justice system doesn’t really need Hollywood to back it up and all-star casts like this one deserve better movies.