An uneducated orphan makes it to a popular game show and manages to answer all the questions.

Rating: 3/10 (26 June 2009)

First, I'll get out of the way what did work in this film. One, the scenery and cinematography. Two, though cleaned up, the abject squalor one sees in India, even in areas of prosperity. Three, that the audience is shown, for the most part, how Jamal knows the answers for most of the questions. That aspect of the film I really liked, and how his past was revealed through these questions. Otherwise, this film was a mess. First off, I found this movie one of the most boring films I have ever seen. I had no sympathy for any of the characters, even though we get a decent back story on the 3 main characters. None elicited any emotions from me whatsoever. The acting was sluggish, and for the most part, actually quite bad, and by most everyone in the film. I could see why the production company had so much press, even negative, to promote this movie. Another problem I had was that for a lot of the Hindi spoken we did not get subtitles, and some of it was important to the story. And though I noticed that all these uneducated, lower caste people spoke such good English, for some reason this did not bother me. Much. A "smart" street kid would learn a major language; otherwise, how else to survive? Well, that's how I saw it. And I waited a long time (Netflix) to get this movie, only to take 5 hours to get through it. It's a basic love story (for a girl; for one's brother; for one's life), and a story of how even the lowest can "make it" (have to have that happy ending you know), so if you want that, then this is the movie for you.