Slumdog has little bark

Am I the only person to think that Slumdog Millionaire is not a great film? True, its pulsating, exhausting and brilliantly shot. As well as being laden with Oscars, Globes and the haughty thanks of the British nation for helping those poor Indian kids (that we ignore the rest of the time).
Yet its greatest asset is also its greatest curse. To produce a film reflecting life in modern-day Mumbai results in a vivid pastiche of colours, sound and a constant visual battering.
But too often director Danny Boyle allows his excitement to get the better of him and the end result is indeed exactly what Mumbai is: noisy, messy and confusing.
It clumsily flits around from present to past without any effort at continuity, reasoning or explanation. When questioning the implausibility of the plot threads, we are asked far too often to simply take Boyle’s word for it.
The greatest inconsistency of the film is its central thread, as our hero Jamal Malik answers his way to winning a cool 20 million rupees on India’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
The film opens at its end. Jamal Malik, the slumdog in question, has improbably got to within one question of hitting the jackpot and the opening sequences show evil cops electrocute him as they try to force a confession of how he cheated.
The inflexible formula of each question awakening a childhood memory supplying the answer soon becomes tired and unnecessary, while the sudden turning of the main police officer from a torturer to, without explanation, a sympathetic listener of Jamal’s tortured soul is utterly implausible.
Growing up, Jamal and his brother Samir, who without warning turns from nurturer to psychopath and then, at the end, inexplicably back again, disappear and pop up here, there and everywhere. Seeing them thrown off the top of a train and landing by chance at the foot of the Taj Mahal it was almost impossible not to scoff out loud.
We are expected to believe the central love story fits around two people who see each other three times in 20 years and that Jamal, every time he goes looking for her, finds her quite easily amongst the 1.7 million inhabitants of Mumbai. There is a chase and they are separated. They reunite, there is a chase and they are separated again. And so it goes.
Another problem is the lack of suspense. Without wishing to spoil it, everyone knows the end as they take their seats at the beginning. We know he wins the money, he’s obviously going to get the girl and the twist in the tail is; well, there isn’t one. It just finishes.
Slumdog isn’t a bad film at all. It’s adventurous and quite breathtakingly shot, and set to a pulsating soundtrack. There are some touching scenes, mostly involving Samir and Jamal as little boys. As they grow, it is difficult to keep sympathy with them as Samir turns nasty and Jamal constantly aloof.
Like any Boyle film, it doesn’t dare to shield us from the gruesome and brutal realities of life in the Mumbai shanty towns, but it has the feel of a film that takes in thriller, romance, Bollywood, action but is left not quite knowing what its meant to be.
It has been showered with awards and glory but underneath, like Mumbai itself, little of it makes sense.