by Joe Murray

Created on: January 27, 2009   Last Updated: February 27, 2009

"Slumdog Millionaire" contains the seven basic Hollywood plots and then some - the Road Trip, the Quest, Confronting the Monster, Tragedy, Comedy, Rebirth, and Rags to Riches - a melange difficult to pull off, though the last movie to try this stunt, "Star Wars," did just fine.

The first images are immediate, what Marshal McLuhan would call hot. A poor but personable young man, Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), has wrangled himself onto the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." The game show sequences (in English) are intercut with another (in Hindi) in which poor Jamal is being tortured by the local police. Apparently, Jamal has won a great deal of money and some mucky-muck with connections thinks Jamal is cheating, so it falls to an ultimately sympathetic police inspector (Irrfan Khan) to beat a confession out of him. Jamal was barely schooled in an impossibly crowded classroom, getting most of his education on the streets. "Doctors, lawyers, never get past 60 thousand rupees," the inspector explains. "I just answered the questions," Jamal replies.

Realizing he has taken the torture too far, the inspector (who would rather be catching rapists and murderers) relents enough for Jamal to take him through each answer, flashing back to his heartbreaking childhood amid the crushing poverty of Mumbai's slums. But 6-year-old Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) and his loutish older brother, Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail), regard the garbage and the filth and millions of plastic grocery bags abandoned and backwatered in their brightly-painted shadow city as a playground worthy of J. M. Barrie's Lost Boys.

Young Jamal is optimistic. Young Salim a bit of a scoundrel. Jamal, eager to get the autograph of a famous Bollywood actor, is using one of the most seriously decrepit outhouses I've ever seen; the enclosure is held above a riverbank by rickety wooden scaffolding, the toilet being a square in the filthy floor through which human waste is deposited below. Just as the actor choppers into the neighborhood, Salim locks Jamal in the outhouse, for meanness as much as anything else. Desperate to get the actor's autograph, Jamal holds his hero's photograph high enough to clear the muck and drops through the hole. Covered in excrement, Jamal gets the autograph. A hollow victory as his brother later steals the photo and sells it. Nevertheless, it is how Jamal knows the answer to the first question, "Who was the star in the 1973 hit film 'Sanjeer'?"

The intercuts between future

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