Film review: 127 Hours

Director Danny Boyle.
With James Franco and Amber Tamblyn
Released 7 January

The past year's films have trapped a lot of people in confined spaces. Lebanon was set entirely within the confines of a tank, Frozen stuck three skiers in a chairlift halfway up a mountain, and Buried trumped them both by shutting Ryan Reynolds in a coffin for 90 minutes. Now comes the most high-profile example of the can't-move-movie, 127 Hours, in which the hero is pinned to the bottom of a narrow canyon in the middle of nowhere, his arm jammed against the rocky wall by a boulder.

Based on the memoir by Aron Ralston, a climber whose over-confidence got the better of him on a solo hike in the Utah desert, it depicts his struggle to stay alive with little food, water or equipment, and no chance of rescue. It's also the first film to be directed by Danny Boyle since he won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire—and, on the face of it, he's not the most obvious director for the story.

In general, Boyle's films are known for their hurtling energy: this is a man who transformed zombies from shambling wrecks to sprinting maniacs in 28 Days Later, and who managed to keep Trainspotting—a film about heroin addicts—barrelling along at breakneck speed. He likes quick cutting and crazed camera angles, large casts and multiple locations. With 127 Hours, though, he has one man (James Franco) talking to himself and his video camera while unable to budge an inch in any direction.

But even if Ralston is wedged between a rock and a hard place (to quote the title of his book), 127 Hours itself can't sit still. The film is peppered with hallucinations, dream sequences, and flashbacks to Ralston's earlier life. And whenever it does stay with its hero, Boyle is always livening things up with montages, split screens, pumping music, and soaring aerial shots.

The result is a movie which is never boring, and sometimes fascinating, but which ultimately blunts the needle-sharp horror of Ralston's plight. To convey some sense of what he went through, it would take a director with the courage and patience to drop us in a canyon and keep us there, but Boyle can't stop lifting us up and away from Ralston's hopeless, relentless situation. And while this wanderlust may be true to the protagonist's own mental state, Boyle's grandstanding reminds us that what we're watching is only a film, and that we, unlike Ralston, can leave at any time.

Nicholas Barber