Film Review: 127 Hours


127 Hours (2010)
Studio: Fox Searchlight
Release Date (UK): 7th January 2011
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Starring: James Franco, Amber Tamblyn, Kate Mara, Treat Williams
Review by: Ben Bussey

Aaron Ralston lives the kind of life a great many of us only imagine living. A genuine lover of the great outdoors, he’s out in the wilderness at every opportunity, climbing and hiking and scrambling and mountain biking, embracing it all with a devil-may-care attitude. But hand-in-hand with that is an isolated existence, a self-imposed distance from his family, friends, and the girl that got away. All this comes back to bite Aaron squarely on the backside when, whilst traversing a narrow ravine, a boulder suddenly comes loose sending him hurtling to the floor below; and, more pressingly, trapping his hand. He doesn’t have much in the way of food or water, hasn’t let anyone know where he is, and all efforts to shift the boulder prove to be in vain. Aaron is set for five days of pain, anxiety and introspection, with a terrible decision waiting to be made.

There’s been an interesting spot of debate amongst the editorial staff of Brutal As Hell as to whether or not we should cover 127 Hours. Anyone who has heard anything about it, and the true life story that inspired it (as chronicled in Ralston’s book Between A Rock And A Hard Place – no surprises that rather bad pun of a title was ditched) knows very well that the protagonist winds up severing his own arm with a blunt pocket knife. It goes without saying that gorehounds are going to be sitting up and taking notice. But does this necessarily mean the film qualifies as horror? After all, this is the latest film from Danny Boyle, his first since picking up the best director Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, and whilst a few titles from his somewhat eclectic filmography have ventured into horror territory – the most notable of these being, of course, 28 Days Later – he’s generally regarded a fairly respectable, upmarket, ‘serious’ filmmaker. Does that make his work appropriate for coverage at Brutal As Hell, or not?

Well, it’s fair to say that 127 Hours really isn’t a horror film. Yet it has a great deal in common with a couple of films we’ve enthusiastically covered in the past year, despite the similarly debatable genre status of both: Frozen, and Buried. (Almost a pity they didn’t choose to call this film Rocked, or something along those lines.) We might regard these films as a spiritual trilogy, or examples of a new subgenre in its own right: claustrophobic, character-based survivalist drama, films which place their protagonists in a life-threatening situation where they are alone and cannot move.  127 Hours is by far the most visually dynamic of the three, accentuating Aaron’s ordeal with plentiful flashbacks, fantasy sequences, and bizarre shots from the inside of his water bottles and the camcorder which he addresses intermitently. These devices serve to break the tension somewhat, and subsequently the atmosphere is not so oppressive here as in Adam Green and Rodrigo Cortes’s films. But 127 Hours more than compensates for this with sheer dramatic power and insight into the central character.

For this, we must give credit to James Franco. I’ll be honest, until now I had imagined he would wind up an ‘also-ran’ among the actors of his age range, doomed to remain in the shadows of the likes of Jake Gyllenhall, Ryan Reynolds, Chris Evans, Cillian Murphy, and his old co-star Tobey Maguire. While he’s never given what I would consider a bad performance, I didn’t suspect he had it in him to really carry a film. Of course, here he is doing just that, and he does a tremendous job. Being less muscular and conventionally handsome than some of his aforementioned contemporaries, he’s easier to buy as a slightly odd loner with relationship issues. He’s strong without being rugged, vulnerable without being weedy; he’s a great example of the everyman hero, the otherwise average guy who rises to the challenge and pushes through against the odds, despite his own fears and failings.

And if that last sentence sounds a bit of a sentimental, feel-good, life-affirming platitude; well, that’s not entirely inappropriate. Sentimental it is not, but 127 Hours is ultimately very much a feel-good, life-affirming film. It’s not giving anything away to reveal that Aaron lives, and whilst the means to that survival may be dire – and yes, gore fans, very messy indeed  – once the shadow of death has been escaped it’s a steady path to an emotionally euphoric climax, aided considerably by the soundtrack. This sense of euphoria, I might add, is very often at the heart of horror. When the hapless victim at last escapes and/or defeats their oppressor, we are at least implicitly reassured that we mere mortals possess greater strength than we realise; that when it comes to life or death, we have it in us to endure and to prevail. So while 127 Hours really isn’t a horror film, its ultimate message is the same as a great many horror films. And this message is conveyed with considerably more technical skill and artistic panache than most. Danny Boyle rarely puts a foot wrong, and I daresay this immediately ranks as one of his finest films. In short, don’t miss it.

That said, I rather wish they’d chosen a tagline for the poster above that didn’t invoke the spectre of Paul Daniels. (If you’re British and over 25, you should know where I’m coming from.)