Rock On

James Franco may have stank up the place as Oscar host, but I was still curious to see the film for which he received a Best Actor nomination, 127 Hours. This is the real life story of adventure seeker Aron Ralston, who found his right arm pinned after a sudden collapse while rock climbing.

If you yourself have also been under a rock somewhere, it's possible you don't know how this story ends. If so, I suggest you skip the next three paragraphs. You know. Spoiler alert. Okay?

So, it was all anybody was talking about when it came to this movie -- watch James Franco cut his arm off. It creates an odd dichotomy while watching the film. On the one hand, the story itself is completely deflated of tension. You know exactly where it's headed, and even though the movie is barely an hour and a half long, it often feels like it's just marking time until the climactic moment.

On the other hand, you get a study in Hitchcock's theory of tension -- that a sudden explosion isn't as suspenseful as seeing the bomb under the table when the characters don't know it's there. Watching this movie, you know the main character is going to have his accident. You know he's going to suffer for a while. And you know what he's ultimately going to have to do. There are indeed a few moments where this "meta-film" level of suspense does make the film more tense.

Fortunately, the movie doesn't have to trade entirely on audience knowledge. The script wisely tackles a big issue head on: are we really supposed to take somebody as "heroic" when he's really an idiot for not telling anyone where he was going? During the second act, the character acknowledges this very issue, and it's one of the better sequences in the movie.

Less effective are the brief flashbacks used to try to open up the action beyond the inherently limited setting. We see Aron's family, but they're so barely defined that even the credits simply list them as "Aron's Mom," "Aron's Dad," and so forth.

So, with a script having both strong and weak moments, both helped and hurt by knowledge of how the story ends, what tips the balance on whether this is a good movie? Oscar nominee James Franco. However poorly he performed before a live audience, he's just as exceptional here. He gives an intense performance, with no one else to work with, nowhere to hide. In the somewhat similar film Buried, Ryan Reynolds at least had voices on the other end of a phone to interact with. Here, James Franco has to go it alone. If the film works at all -- and it sometimes does -- it's all a credit to him.

If you're a fan of performance-driven movies, and undeterred by some CSI-level violence, you may want to check this one out. I rate it a B-.