"When somebody asks me a question I tell them the answer."

Rating: 7/10 (18 October 2017)

A lot of buzz when this film came out, both from movie goers and the industry itself. Since I'm usually well behind the curve on pictures like this, my reaction today with almost a decade gone by is that I don't see what the fuss was all about. It may have been a good old fashioned rags to riches story, but it was a contrived rags to riches story. One expects the kind of coincidence needed to carry a story forward in films of the Forties, Fifties or Sixties, but this was 2008, and seemed to require some lazy writing to pull off. To wit, each and every question that Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) was presented, there was some association with it during his past life. I won't deny that there may be occasional times when some element of cosmic serendipity enters one's life but the repetition that took place here defied the laws of probability. And the idea that Jamal would actually be hauled off and tortured by authorities because they thought he cheated, well I don't know, that seemed brutally excessive, don't you think? I think the game show moderator, if he felt that his popularity was being challenged by the chai wallah whiz kid, could have fixed the show's questions with ones that no one could have possibly answered. Heck, I got half of them myself with a lucky guess or two, same as Jamal. Well, you just never know. Best Picture with four additional Oscar Wins? Good deal if you can pull it off, but I just don't see it.