This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Drama, F, Thriller/Mystery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Gosling, David Strathairn, Rosamund Pike, Embeth Davidtz
Director: Gregory Hoblit
I wonder if Anthony Hopkins is starting to notice that people are afraid to be alone with him? He has done lots of movies of various types, but it is for his evil, killer roles that he is most remembered. This will be another of the latter and it is a pretty good one that will appeal to the mystery/courtroom drama fans
Hopkins is Ted Crawford, a wealthy, acutely intelligent, but arrogant man, deeply in love with his much younger wife. When he finds her to be unfaithful, he shoots her in the head (I guess that’s one way to go), waits for the police to arrive, then surrenders and promptly confesses. Ryan Gosling is appealling (even damn funny in a few spots) as a sharp, arrogant, hotshot DA, on his way out for a made-in the-shade corporate gig and is not happy to have this land on his desk. Still, it seems like an easy open-and-shut case, that will pad his already 97% conviction rate, but things are not always as they appear and Crawford has some plans that see this case become more and more complicated.
This is no masterpiece, but it is not a waste of time either. It is a quality drama with a clever story, and two interesting characters, with more similarities than differences, meeting head to head as the stakes climb higher and higher. In the end, it is the ego that does in the eventual loser of the conflict; a nice touch. To learn anymore, you will have to see the movie.
