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Danny Boyle, either you love him or you hate him. From his past works, it's clear that he always gets either good or bad reviews, rarely anything in between.
From "Trainspotting" to "The Millionaire", the director has produced an easy, pretentious, sycophantic, and exhibitionist cinema in the frantic search of a convenient genre: the dramatic "pulp" of Trainspotting, the hallucinatory thriller of The Beach, the horror of 28 Days Later, the sci-fi of Sunshine, up to the (unjustly) multi-awarded kitsch potboiler The Millionaire, which starts strong with a captivating pop story (the flashbacks in the quiz "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"...) only to reveal its Indian telenovela nature (a fairy tale that's hard to believe) complete with gangsters and love triangles with improbable twists.
Fortunately, the excessive and misplaced ambition of The Millionaire is absent in his latest work, 127 Hours. The film tells the true story of mountaineer Aron Ralston, who, while hiking in the Utah mountains, got trapped in a canyon. To free himself, he was forced to amputate his arm.
The 90-minute film is almost entirely shot in a hole. It goes without saying, the entire movie centers on the character interpreted (very well, mind you) by James Franco. The hiker, overly sure of himself, arouses admiration (envy..?) for his almost unreal self-control: when he gets trapped, he approaches the situation with incredible pragmatism, seemingly unfazed. His life is recounted through frequent flashbacks that reveal his sensitive and profound soul (...) behind the mask of a carefree party-goer lucky with the girls.
Once again, the director proposes a model of a modern hero, humble and likeable ("one of us"...very appealing) like the boy in The Millionaire (who's truly invested with a kind of "sanctity") but possessing great abilities, really too handsome and perfect to be true.
The film is shot in documentary style, with some virtuosity from the director, especially in "cutting" the screen with multiple sequences, something that easily becomes repetitive. The "oddities" to which the eccentric director has accustomed us are not missing. After the Bollywood dance that ends The Millionaire on a bad note, this time there’s a surreal scene where the young man is observed by friends and family in his condition, as if he were on television. The sensation-flashback mechanism remains the same until the end.
As it turns out, "127 Hours" received 6 nominations. In my view, there's much better in this edition of the Academy.
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