Movie Review: Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire is a movie shot in Bombay and directed by Danny Boyle (who also made Trainspotting). It is a movie with stunning cinematic style and pizazz, but unfortunately sorely lacks any imagination, granted the premise of the movie is sort of innovative.

It is the story of Jamal Malik, a gofer in a call center who has managed to almost go the distance in the TV show 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'? Since he is an uneducated person he obviously will not know any factual information and hence must have cheated....so goes the story. Most of the movie is spent in a police station explaining how he knew the answers to each question to prove his innocence. Each of the explanations are so very cliched and contrived that it takes away from any sort of appreciation one might have for the story. Making him jump through a pile of excreta as an explanation for the simplest of questions to suffering all kinds of cliched horrors one imagine street kids go through in India only demonstrates poor research and conviction. Police torture, religious riots....to list a few since it has no real bearing on the outcome....the outcome is good guys win bad guys lose. To add to this there is a whole layer of a completely unfathomable love story. It appears that the story line is inspired by Danielle Steele and tries hard to harm most of the characters to tug at your heart strings. I guess the only difference is that the end is sort of a happy movie, only if you look at the world in black and white. When I read 'A Fine Balance' I could not put it down and how I hated Rohinton Mistry for taking me through such an emotional roller coaster and at the end of it I was stunned for days to come, thankfully 'Slumdog' did not have such an impact on me. The movie tries so hard to be a Bollywood inspired version of 'City of God' meets 'Nayagan' but fails miserably.

Dev Patel does an amazing job as Jamal Malik, Frieda Pinto is Latika the love of Jamal's life since we all know and believe in childhood love and of course destiny and fate...the most basic of all of life's philosophies....and did I mention Love conquers all. Anil Kapoor is Prem Kumar the host of the show and a very dislikable character. The music by AR Rahman just reiterates the point that switching to higher pitched singing sucked in the 90s and it sucks even now although masked behind digital music.(AR Rahman....give up already and while you are at it stop singing.... for my sake!!!!....and Paper Planes by M.I.A. has been played to death on the radio). There has been only one realistic non-documentary movie depicting the life of street kids and that was 'Salaam Bombay', that wretches your gut and does not seem over the top. Mira Nair & Sooni Taraporevala did a job of perfection in moderation with emotions. Perhaps Vikas Swarup while writing 'Q & A', the book on which 'Slumdog' is based or Simon Beaufoy while working on the screenplay should have thought a bit more about subtlety.

All that said visually the movie is stunning and if you liked that pointless inane crap 'Crash', maybe you might enjoy this as well....remember if you liked it....it was meant to be!!!!!!!!!!!!