It’s worth taking a moment to consider the failure that is “Fracture,” if just to contemplate how easily a movie can waste the talents of actors as skilled as Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins. How can two of the more dynamic movie personalities of their respective generations be so underserved by a film that would seem to play to their individual strengths? Where’s that spark of maniacal charm from Hopkins? Where’s the fear and allure? Where are the confrontations?

That’s not to say “Fracture” lacks any head-to-head moments to remember; to the contrary, the film has two captivating moments of back-and-forth, between prosecutor and perpetrator, between Mr. charisma and Mr. crazy. They are juicy moments, brimming with tension and suspense, and we watch for every fleck of an eyebrow and twitch of a lip. At their best moments, they evoke the suspense of the climax to “A Few Good Men,” when the outranked Lieutenant Tom Cruise takes on General Jack Nicholson, or the Ferris wheel sequence in “The Third Man,” when Orson Welles plays a fast-paced game of moral relativity with Joseph Cotton.

Yet these are only two, woefully brief sequences in a film so broken, so dismally adrift and aimless, that one naturally has to question the basic skills of the team that assembled the thing. “Fracture” is an appropriate title, for this movie is a filmmaking schism, caught somewhere between comedy, courtroom drama, personal melodrama, and murder thriller.

Heck, it even has a lover’s spat playing out over Thanksgiving drama. And a key witness in a coma. Willy Beachum (Mr. Gosling) is a public prosecutor, a young hotshot who has just moved from the DA’s office to the city’s most powerful private law firm. He’s got a conscience, sure, but he’s also got student loans.

His old boss (David Strathairn) warns him not to quit, but Willy’s new boss (Rosamund Pike) convinces him otherwise — with the help of a late-night introduction to a blonde who eyes him up immediately and is soon inviting him home to meet the folks for Thanksgiving.

But before Willy leaves to decorate his new corner office, there’s one last case to tie up — a simple one, he’s told, complete with a signed confession from a distraught husband who was found over the bloody body of his dying wife. When Willy shows up to court, he’s introduced to Ted Crawford (Anthony Hopkins), a soft-spoken man with an occasional Irish accent who pleads not guilty to the judge, waves his right to an attorney, and announces he will stipulate to the state’s charges if he can argue his case now, immediately, with Willy as the prosecutor.

And so the stage is set for a courtroom drama that promises to let Hopkins be Hopkins — the bad guy at the card table who already seems to know every card in the deck. Few will fail to recognize the formula that made him so irresistible in his Oscar-winning turn in “Silence of the Lambs,” where he was presented as the serial killer who attacked less with the knife than the brain.

Such is Mr. Hopkins’s depiction of Ted Crawford, who ignores the court proceedings as he scribbles doodles on a legal pad. He’s either crazy or brilliant, and as we start to realize that his confession was procured illegally, and that his wife’s body wasn’t accompanied by a murder weapon, the tables turn.

Perhaps a bit too quickly. If the first third of “Fracture” is about a tantalizing court case, and the last 10 minutes or so are about comeuppance, the middle hour is nothing but a Hopkins-less train wreck, derailing into absurd tangents before collapsing on-screen for all to see. Scene by scene, the drama shifts its focus, first preoccupied with Willy’s inner turmoil over abandoning the public good for his prestigious private job, then tossing in a sudden love affair, then a side story in which a distraught detective seeks to tamper with case evidence, and then an intensive-care subplot involving Crawford’s comatose wife.

Gone is the sharp dialogue that opened the film, which elevated Willy and Ted’s first standoff. Characters start saying blunt and awkward things and the story shifts quickly into forced scenarios that rush by in a blur — Thanksgiving dinner with the family! Eventually, one gets the feeling that an entire reel is missing (the reel explaining Willy’s erratic decline from arrogant to apoplectic, from confident to catatonic).

In the sudden absence of logical story lines, we turn to the realm of humor, and find some release in Mr. Gosling’s giddy delivery. Much as director Gregory Hoblit proved with Edward Norton in “Primal Fear,” he knows how to choose talent, and when he’s not losing his grip this film’s trajectory, he helps us to see in Mr. Gosling much the same energy that came through in the romantic “The Notebook” and the heartbreaking “Half Nelson.”

“Fracture” has no business being this confused or this bad, and even less leaving these two brilliant actors with so little to do.