James Franco is captivating in ‘127 Hours’

By John Soltes

James Franco should be applauded for his acting work in 127 Hours, Danny Boyle’s gripping tale of a young man who is stuck at the bottom of a ravine with his right arm pinned between rocks. Franco is essentially the only acting component of the film’s entire 94 minutes. There are a few supporting characters he meets while hiking near Moab, Utah, and he goes through the obligatory flashback and dream sequences, but this is mostly Franco’s show.

And what a show it is.

The actor, previously known for his turns in Milk and Pineapple Express, demands the audience’s attention. He works through a roller-coaster of emotions, depicting the anger, fury, difficulty, sadness and even black humor of his painful situation. We watch the character slowly descend into madness, and yet somehow he sticks to reality. But that’s the rub of 127 Hours: the reality is downright terrifying. It appears that something drastic will need to take place in order for Aron to get his arm removed.

Boyle, who won an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, is in fine form. He has a way with the lens that makes the desert and red rocks of Utah look majestically beautiful. I’m not the biggest fan of his montage sequences and the original music of A.R. Rahman. For a movie that charts the difficulty of an unconventional character, the music and flashy editing seems out of place. At times, I was wondering whether the movie had become a music video. Sure, Aron is a young man, and he probably thinks in a frenzied manner, but the film has one too many song sequences.

Boyle wrote the screenplay with Simon Beaufoy, based on Ralston’s book Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Their collective genius is that they let Franco breathe life into the character, letting Aron’s strengths and weaknesses captivate us from beginning to end.

Like Touching the Void and Into the Wild, 127 Hours proves to be a must-see for anyone looking for adventure and hard-to-swallow reality.

127 Hours

2010

Directed by Danny Boyle

Written by Boyle and Simon Beaufoy, based on Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston

Starring James Franco

Running time: 94 minutes

Rated R for language and some disturbing violent content/bloody images

Bubble score: 3.5 out of 4

Click here to purchase 127 Hours on DVD.