Watching Anthony Hopkins regurgitate yet another hyper-intelligent sociopath sounds about as inviting as nibbling at Hannibal Lecter's leftovers.

Even Hopkins' own latter-day Lecter in Hannibal and Red Dragon carried more of a whiff of self-parody than the tantalizing aroma of evil that made Silence of the Lambs so delectably malevolent.

So what a disarming surprise -- shock, even -- to discover that in Fracture, a crackling courtroom thriller which casts him as a tycoon who guns down his wife in ice-chilled blood, Hopkins is at his sneering, teeth-baring best.

Rather than deliver the hyperbolic histrionics you might anticipate from an actor with a wry penchant for camp, Hopkins keeps his performance crisp and controlled.

Absorbingly directed by Gregory Hoblit, Fracture is not so much a whodunit as a howdunit. Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer with a bear-trap of a mind and an affection for elaborately engineered do-dads that clink and clack into place like rows upon rows of mechanical dominos. (He's the guy Wile E. Coyote should have been sending his money to all these years -- not Acme Co.)

That Crawford is somewhat perturbed his young wife (Embeth Davidtz) is cheating on him is underlined within moments of the film's opening when he brazenly shoots her in the face. Unlike other such movie monsters, though, Crawford makes no attempt to conceal his crime -- he confesses to it and is even arrested with the presumed murder weapon at his feet.

It's the sort of open-and-shut case tailor-made for Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling), a deputy district attorney angling to ditch his public service digs for the lofty, lucrative offices of corporate law.

Naturally, things don't go exactly as planned and what appears to be a slam-dunk conviction spirals into a knotty clash of wits between Hopkins' wily killer and Gosling's increasingly convicted, conflicted attorney.

We'll refrain to reveal much more of Daniel Pyne's terse script, except to say -- and this is no surprise to anyone who has sat through the trailers -- that Crawford manages to slither out of his seemingly-inescapable noose. For all the suspense it generates however, Fracture succeeds because it recognizes that, like a courtroom itself, the legal-thriller genre is an arena for actors to breathe and snort and poke and prod at each other's weak points.

It's a setting -- and contest -- perfectly suited to the gifted Gosling. The London, Ont., native clamps down on material that could have withered in less capable hands and illuminates his underwritten hero with an energy and cunning that matches Hopkins' own.

(This film is rated 14-A)
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