Bypass theater ticket lines. Buy movie tickets in advance at Fandango.com.

Dir. Danny Boyle

Rating: 7.2  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Jes Sipling

Honestly, this film isn’t fooling anyone. There are no tricks or gags: it’s a straightforward, upward-mobility love story. However, left in the capable hands of director Danny Boyle, who turned heads with the surreal Trainspotting and won hearts with Millions, its cinematic qualities make this simple story pop. Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is in the hot seat, as in, the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” hot seat, televised from India, complete with an Indian Regis Philbin (Anil Kapoor). But when Jamal, a “slumdog” kid with no education, begins to move up the money pole, the police suspect him of cheating and pull him from the show. During the interrogation, the police inspector (Irfan Khan) has Jamal explain how he knew each question and here ensues a series of flashbacks. As each question is considered, Boyle takes us back to Mumbai and through the story of the young Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, later played by Tanay Chheda) an orphaned child running scams on tourists in the slums with his older brother, Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, later played by Madhur Mittal), and a young girl, Latika (Rubiana Ali, later played by Freida Pinto). The three children fancy themselves The Three Musketeers, a popular book in school, and stick together until the ties between Jamal and Salim begin to unravel and Salim moves into his own as a gangster. While it’s interesting to see how Jamal came to all this trivial knowledge, the excitement mostly comes from the fast-paced camera work of Boyle, set to an heart-thumping soundtrack featuring India’s pride and joy, M.I.A., who wrote a few of the major tracks for the film. As we are running with Jamal through India -- with colors as vibrant as M.I.A’s infamous apparel -- the film seems to capture the zeitgeist of the lower class. The well-rounded development of the three mains completely draws us in as we watch the characters grow up, fall apart, and come back together. But even though you can predict the ending almost instantaneously, the story is truly worth seeing, at the very least for the crazy West Side Story-esque, dance-nation ending, which may be one of the best credit rolls you'll ever witness.

0 User Reviews

Add A Review

Want to leave a review? Please login or register with two.one.five! Registered users will have automatic access to exclusive two.one.five promotions, contests and events!