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I don't like Danny Boyle movies any more. I don't know if there's anything necessarily wrong with 127 Hours; I just didn't like it. I'm tired of Boyle's bullshit. It's impossible to sink into one of his films because he's so busy jumping up and down, waving his arms and shouting. There are a few passages of 127 Hours where this admittedly works gangbusters. The majority, though, is a flat failure.

A guy goes into a canyon and gets pinned by a rock. Which would you rather see: the movie that immerses you in the experience, a true human survival story set against impossible odds... or the one that smacks you out of the movie every fifteen seconds with some big, flashy, "hey I'm a movie!!" effect? It's a sorry state of affairs if the entirely fictional (and oftentimes quite improbable) Frozen wins the 2010 "what would happen if" movie sweepstakes hands-down against the story of armless Aron Ralston, which should be, by dint of truthfulness anyway, inherently more interesting.

James Franco holds the centre of the picture (completely alone for an hour and change) just fine. He strikes an improbable, but effective, balance of American sticktuitiveness, gormless charm, and outright douchebaggery. The film does his performance a minor disservice by flashing occasionally out of the canyon in which Ralston is trapped, into fragments of Ralston's memories or fantasies. These glimpses provide useful psychological insight, but deflate the careful personal degeneration that Franco is meting out in stages; these hundred and twenty-seven hours fly by awfully fast, and with little in the way of direct on-screen continuity.

Nonetheless, the nature of the plot construct keeps things progressing; this is a movie of knowing exactly what is going to happen (for the first bit - that Ralston is going to get pinned by the rock; for the second bit - that Ralston is going to do the unthinkable to get unpinned by that rock) and toying with that foreknowledge like a cat with a dead bird. It's not ineffective, though it is limiting as a story. As promised, you will certainly hang on to your butt when Ralston whips out the utility tool and starts cutting, as the film goes full-visceral to give you a pretty solid understanding of what You, The Audience Member, would have to do if you were in Ralston's unfortunate position. Get ready to shiver.

But I'm tired of fisheye wide-angles of landscapes with the colour saturation turned up to eleven. I'm tired of revolving splitscreens and gangster lighting. I'm tired of movies that play like trailers for themselves. On the seventh or eighth opening music/picture montage sequences in as many films, I'm no longer watching what's in front of me; I'm just thinking about how it stacks against all the other ones, and it doesn't stack well. That's enough, Danny Boyle. Calm the fuck down.