Boyle is one of the few directors that manage to work within the solid confines of commercial film but still manage to keep a very modern and unique look. He also knows how to make genre films his own and with Slumdog Millionaire he goes one step further, taking on the whole Bollywood industry. And again, he miraculously succeeds.

It’s always refreshing to see a new Boyle film. He does things with existing genres. Adds to them, mixes them with others, updates them. It makes his films a little harder to a sell to a hardened genre-loving audience, but for those looking for new things to enjoy Boyle is a most welcome certainty. With Slumdog Millionaire he simple reaffirms that status. While his newest film emits a definite Bollywood vibe it is equal amounts not Bollywood, making sure those who have little affection with that side of the movie industry are not immediately put off by the film.

Most notable about Boyle’s style is his ever sprawling cinematography. Boyle’s use of color is impeccable and what’s even better, he is able to keep this up for a whole film. He combines it with strong and vivid camera work and some awesome editing tricks. It gives his films an extra flair mostly nonexistent in commercial film (Tony Scott is the only name that comes to mind, though Boyle is better at restraining himself). Slumdog Millionaire looks lush from start to finish and succeeds in being more than a visual one-trick pony.

Equally strong is the soundtrack and more importantly, the way it is applied throughout the film. Though a little too poppy for my liking it flows perfectly together with the visuals and the both of them create a very solid and tight atmosphere. The inclusion of M.I.A. in particular was a pretty welcome surprise and added a lot to the fresh and hip feel of the film, somehow still a very rare thing in the world of film.

The film itself is neatly constructed around Who Wants To Be A Multimillionaire, one of the most popular game shows to date. Our local hero is able to participate by chance and through some miraculous leaps of faith sees himself in the final round of the show in no time. Him being from the slums arouses suspicion among the program makers but also gives him a local hero status among the people from his hometown. Our hero is taken to the police station in order to clear his name and through a series of flashbacks we see how he was able to solve every question up until that moment, which are all somehow related to a particular period in his life.

A pretty interesting concept which gives the film that little extra and allows Boyle to lean a little more on the drama and feel-good than other movies could’ve. While the outcome of the film is easy to predict and the whole ending is quite sentimental, no other ending would’ve done justice to the film. As for the game show part, its function is clear and its screen time limited, so chances are scarce that the film will feel outdated soon simply because the game show goes out of fashion. Boyle really did a good job with that.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an audience in theaters been this involved with a film. The climax reminded me of young kids watching a puppet theater. Especially when they jump up and shout at the puppets to give them directions (often to point them where the bad guys are). I think more than a few people at the theater were relying on adult conditioning to restrain themselves from doing exactly that during the build-up of the final question.

Slumdog Millionaire works on all levels. While it starts off as a light drama it ends as a pure feel-good film and has no trouble making it work. It’s a pleasure to behold, the soundtrack is right on the spot and the film never dips. It’s good to see Boyle is still developing as a director and even though he might look like a worn out rocker on image, he is one of the hippest and coolest directors working in commercial film today. Slumdog Millionaire is not his masterpiece, but more than an excellent film altogether. 4.5*/5.0*

A lot has been said on Slumdog Millionaire in these parts and elsewhere. It looks to be a major awards contender in a year that has been neither strong nor weak. I sure took my sweet time getting to this film, managing to skip not one, but two free screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival where it went on to win the People’s Choice award (TIFF’s only big prize). Even from the festival catalogue description, I was a bit apprehensive on the Forrest Gump vibe the film’s concept gave off and then there is Danny Boyle’s tendency to muck things up spectacularly in the final act. Look what he did with the last 20 minutes of the otherwise fabulous Sunshine.

**SPOILERS AHOY** You have been warned from this point onward.

In the opening minutes, it is not quite clear that this is the uplifting film promised, as things kick off with a little bit of Guantánamo Bay style torture. Hmmm. Yet it was not long after the flashbacks started that I did realize that the film (Paul Haggis Style) was going to hammer folks over the head with its foreshadowing and not-so-subtly placed hints. Not a problem with that, but there is not much in the film that isn’t painfully predictable for those who have seen a lot of films. (Not that it was the point, but is there really folks out there that really don’t know the names of the Three Musketeers?) I understand that Slumdog is clearly a fairy tale, a rags to riches to love story that is at the very essence of the American Story/Dream/Myth and that may be a large reason for its success. Yet the love story and how the characters end up from point A-B-C fell very flat. Slumdog Millionaire dresses itself in handsome cinematography and a pumping soundtrack, but the basic story at the heart of matters is very familiar.

But Wait.

Amusingly two Disney flicks and another animated film had trailers in front of my screening (Bedtime Stories, Earth, and Universal’s Tale of Desperaux) I thought this very strange at first, but about half way through the film it hit me. This is a Disney fairy tale that just happens to have some scenes of pretty vicious torture, girlfriend beating, and gangster gunplay thrown in the mix. Anyone accusing Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund of overtly stylizing the Brazilian Slums for a rip-roaring piece of kinetic entertainment will probably have a heart attack when they see how Danny Boyle has romanticized the slums of Mumbai. That the films success makes it a very curious 21st century Cinderella story indeed. While every emotional not bounced off me like a stone, I did find myself getting a good charge out of the miasma of global imagery all sidled up against one another in the film. For me this is the chief success of the piece: The of the proximity of wealth and poverty, gangster, and working class; cellular phones and imported brand of an American gameshow. Outsourced call centers being accessed from Scotland; German tourist visiting the Tag Mahal and hiring a child as a tourguide; A UK filmmaker telling a love tale between two Muslim characters which alternated between English and Hindi; the closing musical number that as much a fusion between the closing of Zatoichi, 40-Year Old Virgin and Bend it Like Beckham as it was Bollywood. And then there was M.I.A.’s paper planes (two different versions which again echoed another Apatow production, The Pineapple Express). And there was even a poetry question asked early on in the Millionaire show. Yes it was the world diaspora in one overly-post-processed film. Danny Boyle perhaps does this a little better than Tony Scott, and some of the images are indeed spectacular, yet almost every inch of the picture was crawled over in post production.

Personally, I found Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 to be the much more GRIMM version of this fairy tale (with appropriately downer ending). Yet Code 46’s emotionally austere core was more moving for me than Slumdog’s Love-Conquers-All L’amour Fou. I think these two UK productions are like cousins separated at birth (by about 5-6 years actually). Code 46 being the beaten down cynic and Slumdog Millionaire being the schizophrenic optimist.

Did Irfan Khan remind anyone else of Chazz Palminteri in The Usual Suspects? I’ve convinced myself that Boyle sat Khan (also great in small parts in A Mighty Heart and The Darjeeling Limited) down with that film and said do what Chazz did. Regardless, I loved the cop character and many of the best scenes in the movie are in the police office with that battered old TV playing the VHS dub of the previous nights Millionaire Broadcast. The engaging police office scenes were more than undercut by he facile Scarface rise and fall of the brother, Salim, was perhaps the most slapdash element of the film, in particular, actor playing the gang boss seemed to be sleepwalking through his part. But kudos to the children actors here, particularly the one who played the youngest version of Salim, the child had a certain aura about him that shone on screen.

Lastly, I found the movie recalled some of the most disturbing/moving scenes in Baraka, mountainous piles of garbage with children playing in it and people picking for valuables for a living. I’m trying to come to grips with the fact that Simon Beaufoy and Danny Boyle choose to romanticize the slums in the way that they do in the film. Is it appropriate or exploitative or just merely our world the 21st Century. Slumdog Millionaire is certainly pop entertainment reflective of our times.