A decent attempt for Bollywood to go Hollywood.

Rating: 7/10 (26 December 2008)

Even though the movie is directed by a Brit, the movie still has it's roots set firmly in Bollywood. I don't know if it was intended for a wider western audience, but it was certainly intended to appeal primarily to it's base: the Indians. All of the usual Bollywood touches are there; the soap operatic drama, the manufactured tension, the boy gets/loses/searches for girl, and of course the dramatic ending, where hero wins both fame, fortune, and the girl. Unfortunately what is also there is the unsophisticated/adolescent populist tone of most Bollywood movies. But fortunately we get spared the dragged out musical number. Or perhaps, for western audiences it was expunged!
The idea is fascinating. Put a boy from Mumbai's slums and have him become an overnight sensation on the Indian version of "who wants to be a millionaire." How does he know so much trivia? For every question we see something in his harder than hard scrabble life that has given him the answer, and which he has retained. The death of his mother to anti Muslim mobs; the stint in a beggars prep school run by asocial thugs - shades of Fagan and Twist; the growth of his brother from street gamin to mobster gunsel.
The view of life in the slums goes from depressing to horrific, and while one brother Jamal stays centered to a basic morality, his brother, more unstable from the start, sheds his street punk facade for the big time, and sheds his brother (and steals his girl) in the process.
What doesn't work is the host of the TV show. A self serving, preening, ambitious, hollow character, who acts more as a cattle prod than an MC. What definitely doesn't work is the way he decides to find out how the boy knows the answers. This may play in Mumbai but it ain't going to play in the west, where TV hosts who project their insecurities out on the contestants sadistically don't survive. Arrogant pricks, sure, but sociopaths? Will he answer the final question? That one question we know will be asked, because they give us several hints early on. Who will he call as his "phone a friend?" Here the movie separates itself from the well known rules of the show. Those who are "friends" are holed up somewhere next to a phone, and a computer, and probably a gaggle of helpers, not, as in this movie, at the end of a cell phone whose owner doesn't even know she/he's being called. And the final question? In the US or Europe it would go for a third of the price.