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LAW&ORDER vs HANNIBAL LECTER

We got to watch “Fracture” last Sunday. It’s a good movie. (Well, anything is better than watching Spider-Man 3 all over again.)

Basic plot: Man discovers wife his cheating on him. Man kills wife. Man surrenders to police. Man manages to outwit the police and the lawyer. Man is played by Anthony Hopkins. The man he plays is Ted Crawford, a structural engineer who’s specialized in finding the faults and fractures of airplanes that crashed. As it turns out, his obsession in finding the weaknesses in objects can easily be extended to people.

It’s a whodunit with a twist (because you already know he did it). So, maybe the right term for this movie is that it’s a howdunit. Once explained at the end of the movie, it all makes sense and makes for a good pay-off.

And yet, through out the movie, this little voice at the back of my head (who strangely enough, sounded like Grissom) kept asking: why didn’t they find the original blood trail? Why didn’t they check the fireplace? Why didn’t they check the trajectory of the bullet?

I kept half-expecting the camera to suddenly zoom into the bullet wound and into the body of the wife as techno-music blasts away, every beat revealing a new clue or a dramatic shot of the police holding a Q-tip. That didn’t happen. All we got was the cop saying, “We didn’t find anything.”

CSI has definitely spoiled us. Watching a murder mystery will never be the same.

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