get a grip people!

Rating: 5/10 (28 January 2009)

As I watched this cliché-ridden, manipulative and wholly-predictable film unfold (quite slowly) on the screen, I kept thinking - if this film was set on a Glasgow housing estate, it would have sunk without a trace.
I'm gobsmacked that filmgoers have apparently been so dazzled by the fact that it is set in Mumbai that they are blinded to the corny seen-it-all-before nature of the plot and characterisation. I felt throughout that my emotional strings were being pulled by a clumsy child. I didn't believe one single emotion in the whole movie. The brothers Jamal and Salim stuck together when it suited the plot and fell out when it suited the plot. Jamal's love for Latika was poorly drawn and ultimately cardboard. The device of the gameshow was a tenuous link for a series of vignettes which built not to an emotional peak, but a fiscal one. The climax of the show was so predictable that I guessed it in the second scene of the movie. Even so, Danny Boyle found it necessary to beat us over the head with the set-up at least twice more before the end, even using a flashback just in case we might not appreciate the punchline when it was finally delivered with all the comic timing of Stephen Hawking.
Nothing in this movie exceeded my expectations, which is a terrible indictment when the film is about a place and circumstance you know very little about. I felt as if I'd guessed every scene in the film before I watched it. The story and characters are so familiar to watchers of small British melodramas that they seem disconnected from their landscape, and I couldn't help feeling that Boyle had failed to exploit the city in the way that would have given depth to the story. Apart from the opening scene on the airstrip, I was never surprised or delighted by the strangeness or odd juxtapositions of the setting.
Simon Beaufoy will forever hold a place in the hearts of movie fans for his excellent script for The Full Monty. Slumdog Millionaire doesn't have a tenth of the heart or originality of that film and doesn't deserve the rave reviews it is getting.
Stories of young friends or siblings facing hardship and danger are common and I can think of a few excellent films straight off the top of my head that handle the theme so much better (Small Faces, City of God and A Room For Romeo Brass).
Simply setting a film in an exotic city cannot - and should not - mask the shortcomings of plot and character.