Average

Rating: 5/10 (13 February 2017)

I found this movie to be average. Starting off with two boys on a coal train, stealing coal, it seemed like the film was going to be similar to Slumdog Millionaire, but while the film takes some familiar themes- child poverty, parenting in third-world countries, and living in a country with an enormous population like India- it is an entirely different film. The first half of the film is very good, set in India as young Pawar puts in a fantastic performance as he wanders around looking for his brother and mother, but the second half is just awful. Set in Tasmania, Australia, the film gets boring very, very quickly as we are introduced to a character 20 years later who is going to Melbourne to study and seems to be happy, then abruptly his life starts unraveling, he suddenly has this yearning desire to find out what happened to the family he left behind in India some 20 years ago. There is a scene with his foster mother in Australia that made me physically cringe as Nicole Kidman goes off on a tangent about how she had a "vision" that could have been interpreted as a "mental breakdown" and saw two brown boys and knew that this was her calling in life...Dev Patel also has a foster brother that he is wildly inconsistent with in his relationship. One minute he hates him, he's ruined his mother's life, the next he loves him. The whole half in Australia just ruined the film for me. We all know he will and needs to go back to India, but instead he spends his time getting upset at his girlfriend, quitting his job and avoiding his parents. There is a general feeling of: why doesn't he just go back to India and look for them for goodness sake? So he can finally find the clarity he's looking for? His sudden desire to find his family in India is so bizarre as he seems content then boom at mid- twenties, he needs to go back, its perplexing. Perhaps the first half and the ending when he finally returns to India makes the film worth watching, but the second half was intolerable and ruined what was a extremely promising first half.