'Slumdog Millionaire', anything but a comedy. (Slumdog Millionaire (DVD))

Member Name: Patman99

Product:	Slumdog Millionaire (DVD)
Date:	08/01/09 (57 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A couple of amusing parts, but otherwise a violent film.

Disadvantages: A lot of the film is in Hindi with English sub-titles

Take a boy from the slums of Mumbai, the Indian version of 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire', mix-in a bit of police brutality, corruption & gang warfare and what do you get?. Slumdog Millionaire.

The film opens with the main character Jamal Malik being 'interagated' in a Mumbai police station. His crime?, to answer more questions than they thought he should be able to on the TV quiz show WWTBAM.

The whole film follows Jamal's appearance on the show, and his explanations of how he knows the answer to the questions on the show.

Taking-in his entire life from aged 5 and up, The film dramatically depicts the violence of anti-muslim gangs who rampage through the slums killing everyone in their path, the corrupt police force who turn a blind-eye to the violence occurring right in front of them, the criminal gangs who 'run' the city & the general fight for life that the forgotten poor go through every day just to survive.

This film is billed as a Comedy, but comedic moments are very few, and much out-shone by the violence.

One of the best comedic lines from the film (and one to quote when your boss moans about the length of time you spend in the toilet) has to be 'I didn't know there was a time limit on having a crap'.

Apart from a 5 minute spell based around the Taj Mahal, there were no other moments of 'comedy' to be seen.

Apart from Jamal, there are 3 other main characters in the film, these being Sailm (Jamal's older brother), Latika (Jamal's love interest) & the sarcastic presenter of WWTBAM, who seems to take great pride in humiliating the 'charwala from Mumbai'.

At one point during a commercial break, the shows host goes into the toilets, and knowing Jamal is in one of the cubicles, and tries to con the 'call centre tea boy' into giving the wrong answer to a question about cricket by writing the answers corresponding letter on a mirror, so when Jamal washes his hands the steam reveals the letter to him.

Given the genuine class devide that exists in India, the Host really hates the fact the a slumdog is seamingly more popular than he is, and as Jamal progresses, his comments become even more bitting.

India was the perfect setting for this film, as, if it had been set anywhere else, the lack of such a class-divide would not have worked.

For instance, I can't imagine an English version with a down-and-out winning by applying the same correlations to events in his life working as we have a good education system, a non-corrupt police force & a child wefare service.

Did Jamal end-up winning Ru20Million?, well, you'll just have to watch the film to see.

Summary: Wait for it to come out on free-to-view TV