What on earth is all the hubbub about this film?! Everyone I know raves about like it was the greatest thing in cinematic history. It won the Golden Globe and will probably win the Oscar, if the Academy can resist giving it to another Holocaust movie. I went into that theater prepared to be knocked cold by the shear brilliance of the thing.

This film is boring, badly written, and badly acted (except for the actors playing the young kids – they were okay.)  It’s pretty badly filmed, too. The romantic leads have NO chemistry, and independently they have all the cinematic appeal of wet dish rags. The plot is contrived in the extreme – I didn’t find it clever or impressive at all. And there are lots of mobsters doing their “mobster thing”, which just drags the whole thing down further.  (As my wife pointed out, Mobsters have a very limited emotional range and this makes them really boring to watch.)

But the worst thing about Slumdog is that it’s like watching that idiotic game show for two hours.  This is not great or even good film making: watching the kid slumped over in his chair, looking like a halfwit about to drool, thinking about what he’s going to answer on some game show.

The romantic plot definitely owes a debt to Forest Gump, but even there it falls flat.  The scene in Forest Gump at the Lincoln Memorial where she sees Forest and goes running across the reflecting pool yelling his name has more emotional pull than everything in Slumdog put together. And I say this as someone that thinks Forest Gump is basically a bad movie that I never want or need to watch again.

I think people love Slumdog for the same reason they watch the game show itself – we are all numb with unhappiness and despair and want to be titillated with the fantasy that all the detritus from our meaningless, disappointing lives might one day win us a million dollars on some stupid game show. Just as they say in the film itself: why do people like the show? Because it represents the dream of a way out of their wretched lives.

Oh yeah, as if all this is not enough: WORST CLOSING CREDITS EVER.

And WAY too much bad, over-Autotuned Indian music – make it stop, please!!!!