The audience loves Jamal, I did not

Rating: 6/10 (16 December 2014)

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was a show that took the US and Canada by storm in 2002. It was sensational, suspenseful, dramatic, immense (a million dollars!) and made for one heck of an event. But as Regis Philbin admitted, the network needed to make it a regular show rather than a rare event. The novelty wore off.
A few years later, here's a film, Best Picture-winner at that, trying to recreate that feeling. Jamal is a character on the Indian version of the show. But when the question is posed at the beginning- how is Jamal winning so much money- my sentiment was still, "Who cares?" As the film then goes through Jamal's life story and how it provides him with the information that comes in handy in the game show, I still never built an attachment to his story. There is a story here, not necessarily a bad one, but who is our hero? A rather flat character to whom things happen- he doesn't come across as much of a person, a send-in for ourselves. The same can be said of his love interest, Latika. Even as a story about poverty in a foreign culture and the descent into criminal life, there's not much here than can hold a candle to, say, City of God (2002). How Slumdog Millionaire wraps it up- destiny in finding a lost love, destiny in picking a random answer and getting it right- appears to have inspired much of its audience, but I didn't find it believable and was unmoved.