MovieChat Forums > Fractured (2019) Discussion > Interesting to watch, but plot too impla...

Interesting to watch, but plot too implausible and forced


spoilers ahead... And don't read this if you don't care about the plot and logic of movies, coz this won't make any sense to you. I thought this movie was either going to end with the hospital taking the patients' organs (which would have been hard to believe), or that this was all a dream and Ray was still lying on the ground in that pit at the gas station (which would have been very dissatisfying). But no -- I was wrong; The movie is a combination of things that really happened plus thousands of things that Roy imagined in his mind, and we are seeing things from his delusional perspective. But the problem is that for this to work, Ray would have had to gone completely kookoo, and would have had to imagine thousands of things. This would include his daughter waking up, his wife getting up, his wife getting in the car, handing the daughter to the wife in the car, the wife telling him to hurry to the hospital, his wife and daughter sitting in the ER with him, talking with his wife in the ER, getting his wife the soda and watching her put it to her neck, his wife aggressively telling him to "do something" in the ER, meeting with the finance person at the hospital (i.e. with his wife and child in the room, and sometimes she answered the questions), the child meeting with Dr. Berthram, the child interacting with two other staffers, the child getting a non-existent bear, the child and mother getting into the elevator; and then all the scenes later where he imagines his wife and child in the operating room, and imagines that the routine hospital cart is an organ donation box, he sees the non-existent bear again apparently, and he escapes with them. Certainly people can have delusions, but this is just too far-fetched. Ray was a fairly normal person prior to this. He had a history of alcoholism and was dealing with the death of his ex-wife, and certainly he banged his head, but even a traumatic event like this would not cause an otherwise stable, working, functional person to have audio and visual hallucinations to this degree. There's no indication that he was e.g. schizophrenic. (Note of course that he could drive and check into the hospital and administer himself medication and so he was not entirely bonkers.) So the plot is basically a forced and unrealistic bait-and-switch. Plus, lots of other odd or unlikely things have to occur to make this scenario work. E.g. (1) they lose his admission file -- what are the odds? This helped to create the aura of a conspiracy. (2) the video cameras miraculously don't show the areas where the wife and child were seated and entered the hospital; umm -- cameras are everywhere these days, including a hospital entrance, and likely the elevator too. (And HIPAA has nothing to do with it. Plus in later scenes we see cameras in hallways.) (3) he completely forgets that he got examined by a doctor (so let's add amnesia to delusional). And if he's going to subconsciously fabricate that the wife and child lived, then why even fabricate this whole thing about the hospital? Why not fabricate that they just drove home, or that they were discharged from the ER? He basically replaced one bad scenario with another bad scenario. It's a different point, but some parts of this are just unrealistic and difficult to watch (i.e. other than the hallucination stuff). E.g. (a) why jump down to try to catch Peri? I understand that's a stressful situation and all that - got it -- but still that's really dumb. If nothing else, he might land on her. He's not Superman. (b) it does not seem that the push he gave the wife would cause that injury; just my opinion I guess. Humans don't fall like trees. (c) his overtaking the police is a bit odd, and I don't think they give up their weapons that easily, (d) The stuff where the staff keeps noting blood-type is weird whether it really happened or whether he imagined it. (e) the whole bit about sending him to another ER due to lack of insurance is a bit off; for one I don't think they're supposed to do that -- and for another they acted like this was the first time that somebody offered to just pay out of pocket (f) his interactions at the front-desk are bizarre, e.g. (1) not signing in and apparently thinking that they would just come and get him (2) asking the 2nd staffer about his wife and child without identifying himself (3) his general hostility; (g) do any gas stations really not take credit cards these days, and did he not have a few more bucks for batteries? Some will say that this over-thinking it -- I got that. But we can just watch Bugs Bunny if we don't care about reality. Acting and directing was good, and movie was captivating, but just took a cheap out at the end to explain everything.

reply

Great synopsis and evaluation (though you could have used a few paragraph breaks for readability purposes). I felt the same thing. It's lazy just to make some things real and others not so that there is no way any audience will know where it's heading until they tell us the last few seconds. A good movie like this needs to stick to one perspective and not mix it all up so that we can't make heads nor tails of what we're seeing.

reply

Utterly implausible.

But still a decent movie, 6/10.

reply

Paragraphs please, what a blog of text.

reply