Slumdog Millionarie Movie Review

Slumdog Millionaire is about Jamal, an 18-year-old Indian orphan who has spent his life scavenging on the streets, lands as a contestant on the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and he wins big, 20 million rupees big.

Growing up in the slums of India, he grows up to be a "chaiwalla" or teaboy at a call center in downtown Mumbai. He then gets the chance to be a contestant in the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and wins. A framing device has Jamal being interrogated by Mumbai cops who want him to confess how he won the show, believing that he cheated. To let us know how he won, the film keeps flashing back from Jamal's stint on Millionaire to scenes of his life growing up.

Orphaned during a riot, where his mother got killed, the young Jamal skips around India with his older brother, Salim, the two boys scrambling to survive in a bustling, hothouse landscape of exploitative treachery. They're detained, along with a bunch of other orphans, by a vile crook who doesn't just use them as beggars; he likes to blind his orphans by pouring boiling liquid into their eyes, because then they'll earn more sympathy from passersby.

The two escape, along with a girl, Latika, whom Jamal falls for and keeps trying to rescue. But just as we're reeling from this close encounter with evil, the movie reveals its true, happy design: This episode, and others like it, provides Jamal with the precise piece of information — in this case, a song title — he'll draw on, years later, to answer the questions on Millionaire. The inventor of the revolver, the figure on a $100 bill (he learns that one while scamming U.S. tourists at the Taj Mahal)— all the knowledge he'll need is offered by his life of hardship.

At the end, Jamal is able to convince the police that he didn't cheat and is able to keep his winnings, all 20 million rupees, and even though they were separated, him and Latika get together once again to put the finishing touches to a very well-made and enjoyable movie. It portrays the underdog achieving greatness when all odds are against them.