Smells like a wet dog...

I see plenty of bad movies, in theaters and out, and am not always inspired to write a missive of them, but with Slumdog Millionaire I think it important I do.  The film is, to say the least, well received.  It's garnered several year-end critics prizes and Golden Globe nominations, it has a 93% approval rating on Rotten Tomato (for comparison, Milk also has 93%, Doubt has 76% and Australia a mere 53%) and won the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival.  The film seems poised to walk headfirst into several Oscar nominations once they are announced and I stand back, aghast, at all this critical praise for such a terrible film.  Here is a film almost as awful as it's title, and there will be a backlash.  Here is this year's Crash.  I want it known I was against it from the first, and didn't jump aboard once it became trendy.

     Let me point out that I went in predisposed to pleasure-- you're looking at a Danny Boyle fan.  Trainspotting.  28 Days Later.  Millions.  These are all good films (okay, Trainspotting is a great film, but this is not a post about that.)  Yet here... here he has the most simplistic, nonsense, annoying, stupid story to tell and despite abundant style and beautiful, kinetic location shooting he can't rise above it. 

Here is a film about a poor slumdog from the streets of Mumbai whose destiny is to reunite and live happily ever after with a girl from his youth.  Throw in the fact that the girl is kept by gangsters, one of which is the slumdog's brother and that can either add a level of intrigue and emotional resonance to the whole affair or turn it pedestrian, either way, still not ridiculous.  Now let's mix in the fact that the boy's destiny leads him to the Indian version of 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire' so that... the girl can see him on TV and come to the studio and find him.  Ehh, okay... a film with a stupid premise can still prevail.  This one doesn't.

For starters, the structure is annoying.  The boy is being interrogated and tortured because officials are certain he cheated to get as far as he did on the game show.  Of course he didn't and he explains in flashback how destiny gave him the exact answers to the exact questions he would be asked.  This could work with a little finesse and subtlety, but instead we seem hammered down by the fact that DESTINY HAS BROUGHT HIM HERE! He is asked who invented the revolver-- cut to a scene where his brother threatens him with a Colt.  He's asked a question about a Bollywood movie star-- this leads to an anecdote where he falls into a pay toilet and runs about covered in shit.  Oh destiny, you wily muse!  The editing of the question and the answer so deliberately draws attention to the destiny device, which can't sustain much scrutiny.

So, the destiny angle doesn't work and grows extremely tedious extremely fast.  It goes unanswered how he passed the preliminary exams to get on the show, or what posseses him to even try-- however, I'm not sure the film realizes it leaves him no motivation.  There's a curious scene in an office building where he seems poised to call the show... but instead calls his brother, who, as earlier stated, is a gangster.  The gangster episodes seem as though someone owns copies of Boyz N the Hood and Scarface and keeps them on continuous loop until they are engrained in the psyche permanently.  No one in these scenes behaves plausibly at any time.  Consider, as an example, a scene where the brother climbs into a bathtub filled with cash to be shot down in a barrage of gunfire.  Why?  Metaphor, I suppose.

What this film needs is a nice shot of whimsy and some common sense.  Boyle never satisfyingly works together the juxtaposition of the harsh environment with the fairy tale story, and that handicaps him fatally.  And it doesn't help that the destiny/romance plot line is SO SO SO predictable and uninvolving.  I couldn't get behind anything I was seeing on the screen.  There's no way such fluff could generate real emotions and the film is far to high-minded to adequately manipulate them.  I think Boyle wanted to create something about how hope can survive in the harshest of places, a lovely little piece that would show the dark underbelly of extreme poverty and make it accessible to the masses through a charming against-all-odds romance.  Epic fail, Mr. Boyle.

These characters!  Dev Patel plays the lead boy with all the charisma of a wet mop.  He has one expression-- put-upon, and watching him trying to act his way through is like chasing a deer through the woods with a meat cleaver.  Frieda Pinto, as the girl, is stunningly lovely, yet hopelessly stupid and vapid.  The brother character is nothing mre than a plot device used to elicit emotional responses from the hero.  He has no motivations, no desires, no anything.  Just cue cards reading 'maudlin', 'vile', and 'irritating' to which he imitates in accordance. And the host of the show makes Regis Philbin look like Oscar Wilde.

Oh. My. God.  This film is just awful-- trite, stupid and, worst of all, boring.  And the fact that it's receiving such praise is baffling.  I know it's been a hard year, with a brutal election and an endless war and a downward-spiraling economy and everyone wants to be heart-warmed, or at least reminded that there are people worse off than they are, but seriously, this year also brought us Wall-E and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day... hell, even Funny Games was more pleasant than this.