Over-rated

Rating: Null/10 (27 February 2009)

My summary line alone would likely attract tons of "not agree". So be it.
As one critic (one sensible one out of many) puts it, strip away the "Who wants to be a millionaire" this is quite an ordinary movie. This goes to show how far one clever idea can go in achieving commercial success. Add to that Hollywood's soft spot for things exotic, there goes the Oscar. But Oscar does from time to time reward entertainment value, two recent examples being "Chicago" and "Titanic". Expertly crafted, "Millionaire" suffers in comparison with none in this department. Melodramatic to the bones, it offers you in profusions clichés in abundance: Oliver Twist style childhood, girlfriend in hand of gangsters, underdog triumph, rags to riches, "destiny" (whatever it means).
The one clever idea is linking the otherwise banal story to the world famous "Do you want to be a millionaire show". The movie starts with the interrogation of Jamal in a Mumbai police station in the night after he finished the day's game show with just one last question that will give him the final, top prize. A video tape of the game show earlier is used in the interrogation, allowing the movie to flashback to the game show and from there, through each question, back to the life story of Jamal. This clever set up, together with good directing, editing, cinematography, background music, sound (here I am, of course, running off a list of the Oscars this movie has won), makes "Millionaire" a tremendously successful commercial proposition.
Dev Patel, despite his youthful look, brings good depth to the character Jamal. While not as glamorous as Aishwarya Rai ("The mistress of spice", 2005), Freida Pinto is lovely as Jamal's childhood sweetheart Latika, capturing the hearts of the audience along the way. The other characters are generally stereotype. The two young actors who play "middle" (as opposed to "youngest") Jamal and Latika are excellent: Tanay Chheda and Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar.
As this is a Hollywood movie, it wouldn't do to have Bollywood style song-and-dance every five minutes. But to give it a Bollywood feel, the movie makers had a clever idea of introducing a Bollywood dance number right at the end (one which I enjoyed tremendously). Clever, but not original. Takeshi Kitano did this in Zatoichi (2003), to thunderous applause. Both movie, incidentally, were voted the People's Choice Award in their respective years in the Toronto International Film Festival.