I will NEVER believe the hype again...

Rating: 4/10 (8 February 2009)

Or never pay 11 bucks for it again, anyway. All I've heard was good things about this movie and assumed it would be $11 well spent. Well, so much for that.
This movie is a "boy meets girl" fairy tale story, and I don't mean that in a good way. I know it's supposed to be uplifting and heartwarming but it rings hollow. It's based on nothing more than a gimmick. Seriously, this movie is about a series of improbable events and the rationale by which we're to believe it all is that it's destiny. And, the thing is, I'd buy into it if I could buy that the two characters (boy and girl) had any sort of chemistry. But they don't.
To sum up as briefly as possible: boy meets girl (who, along with his brother, is orphaned at a young age), then boy loses girl. Luckily, some years later, boy finds girl again. But, since his brother is a dick, he loses girl again (he loses contact with his brother as well). Some years after that, he is able to find her again (as well as his brother), but things are complicated. She has somehow fallen in with the wrong crowd and is married to a gangster, who then whisks her away, so boy again loses girl. But he doesn't give up and gets the idea to go on the popular game show "Who Wants to Me a Millionaire," which, he reasons, she'll be watching.
He then goes on the show and answers all but the last question before the show's hour is over. He then ends up at the police station where he is roughly interrogated on suspicion of cheating. It is this point at which the movie starts, and we are then given the rest of the story alluded to above via flashbacks. That is the film's narrative device, to show each question and flashing back to the point where the boy got the answer (except for a few questions for which he uses his lifelines). Turns out, each answer was gotten in the same order as the questions on the show.
As you can probably imagine, yes it's all HIGHLY improbable. ASTRONOMICALLY improbable even. But hey, it's DESTINY and the girl actually does come to watch the live broadcast of the game show and even ends up being one of his lifelines! (Although she doesn't know the answer  more on this later) Then they meet at an oddly empty train station, declare their love for each other and touch lips. Then they, and a bunch of mysteriously appearing other people, go into a funky Bollywood dance number over the end credits. YAY! Except not YAY! BOO! Again, I think I'd be willing to buy this fairy tale if the love angle between the boy and girl was in any way believable. But I didn't see it, feel it or believe it for a second. The characters barely had time to know each other. When the two first meet, they're about seven years old, i.e. a while before puberty, and together for a few days at best before they are separated. When they are reunited a few years lager, they are together for perhaps an even shorter time. When they meet still later, well the girl is hot, but the chemistry between the two still fails to come through, mostly because it's never adequately established before this. The fact that the two characters (as well as Salim) are played by three sets of actors (young, older, oldest) doesn't help. Thus the message of destiny ultimately falls flat.
The movie even poses a multiple choice question asking how Jamal could have known the answers to the WWTBAM questions. Choice A was "he cheated," choice D, "it is written" (I forget what the other two were). When I saw this, I had no idea that the answer would actually turn out to be D, "it's written." Yep, it's written alright. And do you know where it is written? In the script. I'm sorry to say, it really doesn't go any deeper than that.