‘Slumdog Millionaire’ movie review: Danny’s Boyle’s feel-good Oscar winner

After winning eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, the Slumdog Millionaire backlash may now officially begin. 

But while Danny Boyle’s film isn’t the best movie of the year, as the Academy’s choices rarely are, it’s almost immune to harsh criticism: this is a stylized, energetic, crowd-pleasing picture that almost everyone can enjoy, and provides that rare rags-to-riches hero that everyone can root for. 

Despite some qualms about the authenticity of its portrayal of life in Indian slums, the India we see in Slumdog is certainly a different one than we’ve seen before in Hollywood or Bollywood.

At the start of the picture, Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is being brutally interrogated at the hands of a police inspector (Irfan Khan). His crime? Jamal is a contestant on India’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and the powers that be (including host Prem Kumar, played by Anil Kapoor) decide he’s gotten too far towards winning a grand prize of 20,000,000 rupees – this ‘slumdog’ (a phrase invented by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy) must be cheating. 

So in question-by-question flashbacks that cover how Jamal first learned the answers, we get an overview of his life; this narrative device is wholly original and nothing short of brilliant, giving a new spin to Hollywood’s oldest storytelling cliché.

The first half of the film, decidedly Dickensian in tone, covers how a young Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) and his brother Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail) become orphans on the streets of Mumbai and learn to fend for themselves. 

They fall under the spell of a Fagin-like vulture who controls a group of child beggars before learning to make money for themselves as tour guides in the city’s tourist district. All the while, young Lakita (Rubiana Ali) drifts in and out of the picture, endearing herself to Jamal while Salim feels she’s coming in-between the two brothers. The scenes involving the kids are breathless and dazzling, and the best thing the film has to offer.

As the children grow up, Jamal gets a job serving tea to workers in a call center while Salim and Lakita, well, I won’t ruin the surprises Slumdog has in store. But after the wonderful first half of the film, I was slightly disappointed at the way the story worked itself out, as we see Mumbai grow into a bustling city and our beloved characters grow into rather black-and-white characterizations. 

Key events in the characters’ lives sometimes seem to have been given an unfortunately cursory glance. In any event, I was glad that the film came into its own in telling Jamal’s story, the final question of will he or won’t he win becoming largely irrelevant.

Minor complaint: the relative ease of the final 20,000,000 rupee question, which, going by the film’s logic, even a schoolboy should know. But Slumdog Millionaire operates more often on an emotional scale rather than a logical one, and while the question is too easy, it brings the film full-circle.

Be sure to stick through the credits to catch Oscar-winning song ‘Jai Ho’, which was originally written for another film, energetically performed by the young cast.

Director Boyle, famed for more cult fare like Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, keeps everything moving at a breathless – sometimes too breathless – pace, and together with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle creates a vivid India like we’ve never seen before, beautiful and sinister at the same time.

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Jason Pirodsky

Jason Pirodsky has been writing about the Prague film scene and reviewing films in print and online media since 2005. A member of the Online Film Critics Society, you can also catch his musings on life in Prague at expats.cz and tips on mindfulness sourced from ancient principles at MaArtial.com.

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