'127 Hours' rests solely on Franco

127 Hours
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Starring: James Franco
Written by: Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy (adapted from Aron Ralston's book Between a Rock and a Hard Place)

Pretty much like Tom Hanks' Cast Away, 127 Hours basically features only one actor. And luckily like Tom Hanks, James Franco is able to carry the weight of a one-man show and break free. But while Cast Away tells a universal story of perseverance and the willingness to live, Hours is more about the distance a man will go to survive - a tale so harrowing it would inspire Jigsaw's victims.

It is based on a true story about a free-spirited adventurer Aron Ralston who spent (you guessed it) 127 hours with his arm pitted on a canyon wall by a huge rock. Apart from Franco's terrific performance, the movie also benefits from Danny Boyle's trademark offbeat direction. We can sense from the first scene and the opening credits that this will be a different movie-going experience. His split-screen visual style further gives excitement to a movie mainly set in one location.

While he has shown his comedic and dramatic muscles in The Pineapple Express and Milk, Franco this time gives a performance that testifies his status as an actor whose talents are in need of reckoning. My favorite scene of this movie involves a slightly deranged Ralston, a couple of days into his entrapment, pretending to hold a talk show in front of his video camera about his misadventure; it is a scene both funny and heartbreaking that serves as the base pad for his self-exploration on relationships and life itself. And Franco's performance is spot-on.

I also enjoyed A.R. Rahman's score a lot. It is pretty sublime and can get both saddening and thrilling whenever the film needs it be. And that Oscar-nominated song, If I Rise, let's just say I almost had myself choked up when it was played because the timing and mood were so perfect it duly delivered the whole film's essence.

127 Hours hits the jackpot in showing us the strength of human spirit, if you can stomach its climax. For those of you who don't have clue about what happens in the end, let's just say some people did faint at the cinemas during the scene. For me, to be able to sit through till the end gave me a really unique reward - the epiphany that should we fall into a situation (perhaps remotely) as bad as Ralston's, perhaps we were indeed capable of pulling ourselves up.

My rating: 8/10