Feels more like 27 minutes...

Rating: 4/10 (6 January 2011)

Danny Boyle is committing GBH on the frame more than ever these days. It works in 127 Hours initially – during the opening cross country scenes, with the ironic camera swooping across the landscape not to find some undiscovered wonder, but Aron Ralston (James Franco). As Ralston approaches the gorge that will become his living tomb, the editing ratchets further, and the tension mounts. Yet it never STOPS ratcheting. Even as Ralston's poignant premonitions begin, of the son he may never have, Boyle is intent on pummelling our senses with colour and sound, never allowing us to settle into the lonely mundanity; the grey, endless dread. We're left with a breezy comic book descent into an unconvincing hell.
The decision to depict Ralston as smug and vacuous is admirable, although given that he now commands an eye-watering honorarium for motivational speeches in real life, it would seem that this is a character rainbow at whose end has not been found the Church of Humility.
Perhaps there is an underlying commentary on these narcissistic times here: the notion that Ralston may have taken the final, gory step towards survival out of a semi-conscious desire for celebrity. Even his heartfelt message to his folks (probably the film's best scene) is performed as a brash American talk show. Boyle and co-writer Simon Beaufoy, with their premonitory promises of a selfless paternal utopia, do their best to (ostensibly) scupper this suggestion; but the smell still lingers, not least because they've, well, made a film about the guy. There's a self-fulfilling irony here that's hard to comprehend.
The film serves as companion piece to Slumdog Millionaire, insofar as Boyle bleeds a heart-warming story from the bleakest of backdrops, building the narrative from grizzly horror, through drippy sentimentality, to orgasmic frenzy. The tonal shifts in 127 Hours might be slightly less jarring than the former film, but the aftertaste is no less tooth-rotting.
On the occasions the editing settles we glimpse a fine performance from Franco, although less varied and witty than Ryan Reynolds' in Rodrigo Cortes's Buried. Come to think of it, Cortes's film summons more excitement, humour and pathos from the confines of a single box than 127 Hours can muster with all its gimmicks.