| Rating: | ★★★★★ |
| Category: | Movies |
| Genre: | Foreign |
Set in 2006, the film opens with a police inspector (Irrfan Khan) in Mumbai, interrogating and torturing Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a former street child from the Dharavi slums. In the opening scene, a title card is presented: "Jamal Malik is one question away from winning 20 million rupees. How did he do it? A) He cheated, B) He's lucky, C) He's a genius, D) It is written." At the end of the film, the answer is given. Jamal is a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Kaun Banega Crorepati) hosted by Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) in which he was on the show and won 5,000,000 rupees. Jamal has made it to the final question, scheduled for the next day, but thanks to a tip-off from the host, the police are now accusing him of cheating, because the other possibilities, that he has a vast knowledge, or that he is very lucky, both seem unlikely.
They Say:
Slumdog Millionaire has been critically acclaimed in the Western world. As of 21 February 2009, Rotten Tomatoes has given the film a 94% rating with a 186 fresh and twelve rotten reviews. The average score is 8.2/10. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 86, based on 36 reviews. Movie City News shows that the film appeared in 123 different top ten lists, out of 286 different critics lists surveyed, the 3rd most mentions on a top ten list of any film released in 2008.
Most Western reviewers were strictly positive about the movie. For example, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film four out of four stars, stating that it is, "a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating." Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern refers to Slumdog Millionaire as, "the film world's first globalized masterpiece." Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post argues that, "this modern-day "rags-to-rajah" fable won the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year, and it's easy to see why. With its timely setting of a swiftly globalizing India and, more specifically, the country's own version of the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" TV show, combined with timeless melodrama and a hardworking orphan who withstands all manner of setbacks, "Slumdog Millionaire" plays like Charles Dickens for the 21st century." Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times describes the film as "a Hollywood-style romantic melodrama that delivers major studio satisfactions in an ultra-modern way" and "a story of star-crossed romance that the original Warner brothers would have embraced, shamelessly pulling out stops that you wouldn't think anyone would have the nerve to attempt anymore." Several other reviewers have described Slumdog Millionaire as a Bollywood-style "Masala" movie, due to the way the film combines "familiar raw ingredients into a feverish masala" and culminates in "the romantic leads finding each other."
I Say:
Slumdog Millionaire is absolutely stunning. To begin with, it's not boring somewhere. The depiction is too awesome I'm loss at words. It's indeed worthy of it's awards. Definitely a must-watch.
On a side note: Dev Patel looks a bit like Robi Domingo, doesn't he?
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