Terribly contrived

Rating: 4/10 (29 January 2009)

This film left me with one thought, "So what?"
This is a movie without any act of heroism, and simply another movie aimed at trashing the concept of living a purposeful life with goals.
It expresses the modern day philosophy that says if you are born in poverty you cannot help yourself other than through luck (winning a game show).
Why not tell an inspiring story of a "slumdog" becoming a successful businessman, overcoming various obstacles that inevitably come life's way, and developing a parallel story showing how and why he falls in love with the girl of his dreams?
The theme of the movie has been misleadingly portrayed as a moral comment on today's global recession and in particular we are shown a character who cares more about the concept of love than money. This is demonstrated in the less than dramatic and completely contrived climax when the lead character attempts the final question knowing he does not know the answer and simply makes a guess.
We are being asked to accept that a poor kid in love would willingly give up the winnings he has accrued to date because the woman he loved answered the mobile phone when he decided to use a lifeline and "phone a friend" in attempting to find the answer to this last question. Of course, he did not know she would answer it, but it seemed he had already made some inexplicable decision to gamble his accrued winnings.
In this situation, any reasoned person would accept his winnings to date, collect the cheque, and put the money towards investing in a career through which he could support his (supposed) future wife - and use the money to invest in her career as well.
But no, he gambles all that potential life enhancing value because of love. The ending and the last 30 minutes were nothing more than contrived nonsense.
In fact the love story itself was limp - there was no rhyme nor reason as to why the lead character was in love with his girl; there was such limited dialogue and interaction between the two of them that they may as well been passing strangers.
The idea of portraying scenarios explaining why the lead character knew the answers was interesting - to a point - and did explain his upbringing, though as many have noted, quite how he progressed to well-spoken English is left unexplained.
The vignettes themselves were uninspiring as stories in themselves - quite what is so funny about a boy covered in faeces I am not so sure; lame humour at a kid's expense. This was followed by episodes of child torture and criminality - malevolent stuff indeed.