Not as Good as All the Hype...But Good Nonetheless

Rating: 7/10 (4 April 2009)

Slumdog is a good film overall, but I did not understand the massive hype surrounding it. It is not one of my favorite films from 2008. However, in terms of all the Oscar nominees it was the Best Picture of that group. The film centers around Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) who is accused of cheating while being a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. He is sent to police headquarters where he is subsequently tortured into revealing who helped him and why (apparently in India, you are treated like a terrorist for cheating on game shows). This leads to Jamal regaling his captors with stories from his past that coincide with each question that he answered correctly. As a child, Jamal befriends a beautiful girl Latika (Frieda Pinto) and he falls in love. However, his brother Salim, who doesn't hesitate to betray Jamal at every turn keeps ruining his chances with Latika and makes her vanish from his life. But Jamal vows to find her and save her. One of the main reasons he becomes a contestant on the show, so he hopes she will be watching. The film culminates with Jamal being released from police custody to go and try to answer the final question for 20 million rupees, where in an attempt to phone a friend, gets the surprise of his life.
There are some aspects of the film that are clichéd and confusing to me. My favorite parts of the film were the sequences of the main characters as children and the horrific things they have to endure to get by on the streets of Mumbai. Danny Boyle is an exceptional director and once again he does a good job with the source material. The acting was decent as most of the child actors I believe have never been actors before, so they did a pretty good job. It is worth seeing but again, I don't think it was earth shattering.