Don't believe the hype

Rating: 1/10 (29 March 2009)

Starting with the eager to please fast cutting, Slumdog glosses over anything unpleasant and gives the overall feeling of a music video. This makes poverty feel like a fun time to the middle class westerner. Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe aptly put it "I feel like I'm escaping into something that many people can't escape out of." The most telling scene of the movie in which Jamal cons a tourist reinforces British Danny Boyle's sense of superiority to American tourists and Indian slum dwellers. "This is (the real India)" Jamal says to them. "Here's a bit of the real America" the tourists say as they give Jamal a 100 dollar bill. Millionaire may be aiming for Dickensian social drama, but unlike Bleak House or Oliver Twist, it rings utterly false. Part of the problem is that Boyle knew very little about India until recently and decided he maybe wanted to educate himself. Or perhaps it's just his effort to recolonize India for the Brits.