..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle

Slumdog Millionaire is a dancing, crackling, incandescent shockwave of a movie, a visually explosive tale of poverty, wealthy, love and crime in contemporary and slightly older India that grips you and stuns you. It’s a pulse-racer, a technically exhilarating movie that uses the modern devices and tricks of cinema, infuses them with a wild, rushing energy and -- without sacrificing social insight or dramatic depth -- ends up all but blowing you out of your seat.

The latest movie from Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), Scotland’s master of film pyrotechnics and wild side stories, it’s set in Bombay (or Mumbai), and it revolves around three children -- two orphaned brothers, sensitive Jamal Malik and roughneck Salim and their gorgeous little friend Latika -- all of whom we see at three different points in time (childhood to late teens) rising up from the muck and danger of the Mumbai slums to higher levels of the criminal underworld.

Slumdog Millionaire is a tale of innocence despoiled, society in ferment, and romance persevering, and it’s framed by an exciting oddball Indian parody of the American TV quiz show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” in which the older Jamal works his way up to the grand prize of more than 20 million rupees. Guiding him on this mercenary quest is a suave, narcissistic, cynical host, Prem (Anil Kapoor), a sly showboater who teases and goads Jamal, and even seems jealous of his contestant‘s shy charisma.

When the film opens, we see Jamal in the clutches of a cool, brutal police inspector (Irrfan Khan), who’s torturing Jamal, to try to find out if he’s been cheating on the show, surreptitiously getting the answers they believe a mere slumdog of a street boy couldn’t possibly know. Jamal obliges his tormentors by telling the cops his life story: how he and the rougher and more corrupt Salim struggled on the streets after their mother/s death, how he met (and fell in love with) Latika -- and how, incredibly, he kept going through experiences that taught him the answers to the very TV show questions that ultimately push him toward fame and fabulous wealth.

As written by modern movie-fairytale specialist Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) -- who’s adapting Vikas Swarup’s novel, Q & A -- it’s not a very likely story. But Boyle, just like Michael Curtiz in Casablanca, makes it go by so fast we barely notice. This is high voltage filmmaking of a particularly compelling kind, and the many critics who’ve compared the story to Charles Dickens’ London novels on rough youths have a point. Dickens is a great novelist, one of my favorites, but academic Henry James-lovers often dismiss his fantastically entertaining novels as merely melodramatic. But as with gripping classics like Oliver Twist, or Hard Times, there are gems of social truth embedded in Slumdog, surrounded by delicious layer on layer of fabulous comedy, touching romance and exciting crime or adventure.

The actors, including Kapoor, Khan and the nine young players who take the roles of Jamal, Salim and Latika, are all excellent, and Boyle -- just as he did in the sordid but exuberant hipsters-on-heroin story Trainspotting and the delightful kid‘s movie Millions -- never relaxes his narrative grip or slows the movie’s headlong drive. Slumdog Millionaire is a classy mix of social realism and fantastic genre-twisting, with a style that blends Bollywood, Dickens, schlock TV and Pixote or City of God.

Boyle pulls off this incredible cinematic juggling act with tremendous flair and panache. I wouldn’t call the movie a masterpiece, but maybe I’m short-changing it. Slumdog Millionaire is more entertaining and memorable, more of a kick, than many of the films that are.

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