Positive, mostly.

At its heart SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE is a strange beast; it wears it’s rough and ready credentials within the framework of a slick, albeit highly enjoyable, fairytale. It’s alien landscape is a large part of the fascination and also a major reason why we view it with such easy admiration, everyone likes to see something new; and I did find myself wondering that had the story had been set in Philadelphia with Shia LaBeouf we would probably still give plaudits to its charm and vibrancy, but perhaps not to the award-worthy extent now shown.

Jamal Malik is an 18 year old orphan from Mumbai’s streets and is just one last question away from winning the big 20 million rupees prize on India’s version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’; but before his big showdown he’s arrested on suspicion of cheating and over the course of a night he tells the police the extraordinary story of his itinerant street life with his brother Salim, religious violence, adventures in survival, the girl Latika he loved and lost. Jamal apparently has no interest in money, so what’s he doing on the show, and how does know all the answers?

Danny Boyle has never been a conventional film maker, which isn’t to say he lives on the edge of the avant-garde, but he does take the familiar and give it a different approach, and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE is a perfect case in point. There’s nothing in the basic story that we’ve never seen before, the trials and impossible love of an impoverished urchin rising to adult success was handled fairly well by a Mr Dickens, but Mumbai’s existence in the 21st century seems a sub-continental mirror to Dickens’ world and that’s what Boyle has managed to unleash with such humour, thrills, veracity and plain old romance.

Adapted from a source novel Boyle uses a loose and kinetic shooting style, including a 12 frames per second stills camera they coined the ‘CanonCam’ that in the early segments shot in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi is a wonder to behold, it’s an absolute belter; and the children they managed to find to play the 2 brothers add immeasurably to the whole effect. By the time of the story’s jump to the early teenage years I was hooked.

Danny Boyle is quoted as saying that they always wanted to do the film in English, but that the casting of natural performers for the early childhood segments prevented it. So we have an admittedly ingenious segue from the Hindi (Maharati) of children to the English of their later years via an ignominious evacuation from a freight train; however this desire to have one’s cinematic cake and eat it does cause problems. Primarily by having captured us so convincingly with the totally charming, exciting and perilous existence of Jamal’s and Salim’s Hindi enveloped childhood the switch to English pulls us slightly away from the story and the all the players involved. It also doesn’t help that 2 of the principles, namely Dev Patel as grown up Jamal and Freida Pinto as Latika are less assured and convincing than their pint-sized counterparts. Even the evil Fagin like criminal of their childhood is more interesting than Jamal’s grown-up gangster nemesis and Latika overlord, who in one unlikely scene involving Jamal pretending to be Latika’s new cook comes across more as a myopic buffoon than the epitome of evil.

So does it deserve the attention it’s currently garnering? Yes, absolutely. Does it deserve to be floated towards the rareified heights of Oscar buzz? Well, perhaps not. Don’t get me wrong though, as a piece of crackerjack entertainment it is hard to beat, and I would view with a fair amount of scepticism anyone who didn’t watch it and simply wonder at its 2 hours of transposition and rollercoaster fun.