127 Hours

Based on a true story, 127 Hours follows James Franco’s Aron Ralston as he embarks on a routine trip through some isolated mountains and is subsequently forced to resort to extreme measures after he’s trapped beneath an immobile rock within an especially desolate part of the rugged terrain. There’s never a point at which 127 Hours doesn’t feel like an almost prototypical Danny Boyle effort, as the notoriously flashy filmmaker has punctuated the proceedings with all of his expected stylistic flourishes – including split screens, rapid-fire editing, and copious use of flashbacks and cutaways. It’s clear that Boyle’s in-your-face directorial choices are meant to compensate for the decidedly stagy nature of the film’s storyline, as the movie is, when you get right down to it, primarily about a man waiting to be rescued. And although the build-up to Aron’s perilous situation is admittedly quite engrossing (ie when’s he going to get trapped, anyway?), 127 Hours suffers from a midsection that is, despite the best efforts of both Boyle and his incredibly talented star, hardly as engrossing as one might’ve hoped. This is despite the inclusion of several thoroughly compelling interludes (eg Aron goes off on a long, fascinating tangent about how the rock has been waiting billions of years for him) and an overall atmosphere of impressive authenticity. The film’s watchable yet far from enthralling vibe persists right up until Aron takes matters into his own hands, with the ensuing sequence just as graphic and difficult to watch as anything within contemporary cinema (ie it’s so unflinching that even veterans of the Saw and Hostel series will find themselves growing queasy). The movie is capped off with an undeniably powerful finale that isn’t quite enough to compensate for the uneven nature of everything preceding it, which unfortunately cements 127 Hours as a technically impressive piece of work that simply isn’t as consistently engrossing as one might’ve expected.

**1/2 out of ****