Child actors have vim and charm
Slumdog Millionaire
Director: Danny Boyle
Cast: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor, Madhur Mittal, Saurabh Shukla, Irrfan Khan, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar
Rating: (13) Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) plays the game.
The game is Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and when the contestant who knows all the answers is a Chai boy who grew up in the slums of Mumbai, he has to be cheating, right?
Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) the hero of Slumdog Millionaire (Rialto) actually is appearing on the television game show for a reason beyond money.
Each question as it appears bears some relationship to Jamal's event-filled life and gives director Danny Boyle a reason for a sequence of emotionally tense flashbacks.
Just as Millionaire starts with low-value questions, Jamal begins with almost cheerful escapades and moves on to dangerous situations.
Through it all, he has the not-always-loving companionship of his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and his romantic feelings for fellow slum child Latika (Freida Pinto).
Jamal is a gentle dreamer and not much of an protagonist.
For most of the film he looks on in horror at Salim's anything-to-survive philosophy and wrings his hands at the problems that Latika's beauty causes.
For all the awards that this film is gathering, it is hardly a perfect composition. It is colourful and moves at a clip but it is also melodramatic and poorly acted in parts.
What saves it is the authenticity of the child actors who really are from the life of the slums.
Best thing: this is a film of two parts and sequences with the child actors have vim and charm even though they are the most harrowing.
Worse thing: as the characters age, the story becomes increasingly cliched and less well acted.
See it with: out having read Q&A, Vikas Swarup's novel, on which this is based.
-Christine Powley