Movie Review: 127 Hours

Yeah, I know I’m kind of late to the table on this one. What can I say? I’m usually not a huge fan of uncomfortable movies–I like to see movies to escape troubles, not to be forced to endure 127 hours of agony. It takes me a while to gear up for something like this.

And this is a movie you need to gear up for.

First off–was it good?

Yes. As far as “Movies where a guy has his hand pinned by a boulder for 127 hours and is in constant, awful pain” goes, this was a good one. It’s well acted, well produced, and well executed. That said, I think the main reason I liked it was that (MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT–but if you didn’t know this, you didn’t follow the news at the time) he gets free at the end, and I could be relieved for him.

That said, this is like a 99% awful terrible ordeal movie, 1% happy ending. The stark contrast makes you appreciate the ending that much more.

But it’s still not a “fun” movie to watch. If it weren’t so darn close to what actually happened, I wouldn’t like the film. But according to the guy it happened to, it’s as close as you can get to a documentary with it still being a drama. So . . . yikes.

Definitely a movie that makes you appreciate watching movies as a hobby, as opposed to hiking. My biggest potential hazard is forgetting where I put the channel changer.

Also, for those of you wondering about the R rating–it’s R for language, primarily. Because when a boulder falls on a man’s hand and pins him there for 127 hours, he doesn’t exactly just say “shucks” the whole time. (He also does not say “golly” or “darn it all.”) A bit of sensuality here and there, but the language is the thing that earned it the rating.

In the end, it’s a hard one to review. I’ll give it three stars, mainly because what it wanted to do, it did well. Anyone else seen it? What did you think?