Why I always carry my Swiss Army knife

127 Hours

Crit

What better way to work up a Thanksgiving appetite than to see James Franco cut off his arm with a dull knife?

OK, I'm here to do my part to combat the tendency of referring to this as "the movie where James Franco cuts off his arm with a dull knife." (Incidentally, I'm pretty sure James Franco didn't actually cut off his arm with a dull knife; I think a stunt double cut off his arm with a dull knife. But I digress.) There's a lot that goes on here besides James Franco cutting off his arm with a dull knife. For one thing, because the knife is far too dull to challenge bone, before James Franco (or, let's just say Aron Ralston, the real-life cutter-off-of-his-arm-with-a-dull-knife whom Franco plays) can cut off his arm with a dull knife, he has to break that arm. So there's that.

But director Danny Boyle, no stranger to the unwatchably intense, has sense enough sometimes to get us away from the scene of the impending crime against our sensibilities. This he does via flashbacks--to a failed love affair, to a regrettably unreturned phone message from his mother, to a first boyhood glimpse at the magnificent Canyonlands vistas that have driven (and now threaten to take) his life--and increasingly hallucinatory fantasies about how this might turn out, or what he might be doing right now were he not stuck, per the title of (spoiler alert!) Ralston's book, between a rock and a hard place. And when I say "increasingly hallucinatory," think Scooby Doo. We also get to see the real-life one-armed Ralston, with his wife and baby and with a supercool superheroish prosthetic climbing tool attachment; he still does crazy things in the wilderness, we are told, but now he always leaves someone a note telling where he's going.

It is, in short, a remarkable film, one that may join Trainspotting and 28 Days Later as Boyle films I need to own, and so I would say to you, if you are a James Franco fan, if you have described him as "one of the few boys [you'd] do" (you know who you are), but were planning to avoid this film because he cuts his arm off with a dull knife, I would say to you . . . do not see this; dude, he cuts his arm off with a dull knife! Are you nuts?