Crapture
Written: Jun 17 '07 (Updated Jun 17 '07)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Hopkin's character's cool house and marble machines (basically Wealth Porn)
Cons: Everyone and everything else
The Bottom Line: Fracture is a poorly made, boring piece of junk. A textbook example of canny film marketing taking tiny elements out of context to misrepresent the product
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| WhtdoIKnow's Full Review: Fracture |
I've decided to write a pair of bookend reviews featuring this piece of decroded dog crap contrasted with the amazingly entertaining and well-made "Hot Fuzz".The basic idea for this concerns film marketing and film reality. Vis: the trailer/marketing for Crapture are cannily designed to make it look like a great film - presenting a perfect example of how tiny bits can be taken and used to create this illusion - Crapture being a truly bad piece of dreck. On the other hand, the marketing/trailer for "Hot Fuzz" falls far short of revealing what a great, deep, satisfying piece of entertainment it is. (BTW: there is a spoiler or two here but TRUST ME – you don’t want to waste your money/time on Crapture).
I had a better title for this one but can't remember it. The current one is simple spontaneous spite but derivative of a prior review I didn't actually write for the equally goony Connery/ZetaJones BM "Encrapment". Feel free to use these as desired.
Ok. Crapture. Here is the marketing:
One - Anthony Hopkins looking all Lecter-y while delivering creepy lines of apparent intelligence - (Check! entire family love this! frission galore - "I'd see that movie").
Two - Young Ryan Gosling in tight Brooks Bros. pants, impeccable sleeves rolled up; clearly sly and smart but w/ a touch of Southern wide-eyed, boyish charm - the hot-shot hot young lawyer in action (Check! Mom, Sis, and Grandma Grace are firmly on board - "Ooh, who's that? He's cute but smart and w/ touch of ... and nice pants!" "We'd watch him do just about anything for 90 min").
Three - Various dispensable thin attractive females - lean legs projecting from tight Brooks Bros. skirts, athletic breasts swelling against silk/cashmere tops (one gets shot in the head? - even better!)(Check! Dad, Jr and Grandpa Joe: "Hmmm, this looks like a good intelligent film!").
Now mix it all together fast (to disguise just how plodding the actual film is and juxtapose Gosling and Hopkins to create the illusion that the film is some kind of duel between them (actually just about the whole of their modest interaction is used in the trailer from what I could tell).
Crapture does have all of these elements but the assumption is that what was being depicted were component parts of some kind of well-made film that told a story that you'd like to see and would be worth your money. That is not the case.
Crapture's total failure begins with an amazingly bad screenplay. It is really like several bad screenplays somehow badly mashed together to create a single fragrant mass of boring garbage. In quality, these range from mediocre to shockingly inept.
The first screenplay is the one about the murder/courtroom mystery. This was the mediocre one. The basic mystery premise was just typical of the genre and nothing special. The courtroom material was (as is often the case) totally ridiculous besides being some of the most boring murder/mystery courtroom drama in recent memory. A minor point is that in the trailer this material is all tarted up with editing to present it as having a "thriller" feel to it - completely absent in the film.
The second screenplay - possibly the worst, I don't know - was a romance between the two lawyers; Gosling's hot-shot prosecutor on the way up and his new potential boss at a mythical big-name law firm going after him for a position. This was horrible, simply horrible. It failed in every way. The boss lady’s character was one of the most ridiculous, misogynistic pieces of junk to come out of "Hollywood" writing in quite awhile. But apart from that, everything about this "relationship" was false with not a split second of chemistry or even recognizable human interaction between these two actors - just one cringe inducing scene after another.
The third main element was that old chestnut; the lawyer wrestling with his conscience. Should he grab the gold ring, the fancy office and silk-encased breasts OR should he stay as a lowly prosecutor but have the opportunity to “pound the stake into the bad-guy’s heart”? This phrase comes from the silk-encased breasts’ father (we’ll call him Judge Silkbreasts - sounds like a Pynchon character huh?) who, while wearing Robert DeNiro’s sweater from Meet the Parents consoles and advises our hero following a nasty fork-on-teeth hissy fit at the dinner table with Ms Silkbreasts Esq during a full on Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving at their stately family home (to which our hero has been miraculously invited by counselor Silkbreasts and even more miraculously agrees to attend following a single minor hook-up). Don’t Ask – you don’t want to know and I’m sorry I even know. You getting an idea about how badly this sucked a$$?
Oh, ...and then we had the fourth element – a bizarre nod to Terry Schaivo? - in which our hero – having made the right choice above – sentimentally but impotently defends the brain-dead body of Hopkins’ character’s wife mainly by reading to her from Dr Seuss (!) This actually provided the only bit of “thriller” in the entire enterprise with a badly paced bit of nonsense in which Gosling rushes – well drives relatively fast, Freeway traffic permitting - (third rate “soundtrack” music pounding in the background) to her hospital room incoherently waving some potentially semi-legal unexplained document only to be pushed slightly by a security guard. He falls to the floor and writhes there in slow motion, trading leers with Hopkins – just slightly too late to prevent the plug pulling and flatline. Putrid, putrid, putrid.
So, that’s the substance of the starting product here and it really went downhill from there. I think Gosling gave the only vaguely decent performance. Hopkins is actually barely in the film and you know he was really pretty bad – just doing a 2nd rate Lecter impression mixed up with some occasional Irish gibberish. They somehow corralled David Strathairn into this as Gosling’s boilerplate DA boss but you can’t blame him for getting a paycheck. The other participants are entirely forgettable and further dissection is unnecessary.
This was an annoying, boring movie and for WW and I another perfect example of walking out of a theater feeling dumb and cheated. I mean we know you can’t trust the marketing or even the bovine critical consensus out there (71% at Rotten Tomatoes, ye Gods what are you people smoking??) but still....we figured how bad can it be? Well, now we know and so do you.
Recommended:
No
Movie Mood: None of the Above
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Script
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WhtdoIKnow
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Location: Maplewood, NJ
Reviews written: 87
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