Slumdog Millionaire is about the life of a street rat in India who spends his life connecting with and losing touch with the girl of his dreams. The movie starts off with Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) climbing through the ranks of India's "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" show. In fact, he does such a good job in his first run that he is suspected of cheating and that night, he is taken into custody and severely questioned. Everyone thinks it's odd that this slumdog tea server knows the answers to questions ranging from "Who is on the American $100 bill?" to "Cambridge Circus is in which U.K. city?"
In order to prove his innocence, Jamel must tell his life story to a pair of cops and show where he got each tidbit of data. What amazes both he and the cops is the fact that he knows the answer to these questions, but not more commonly known ones like "What motto is inscribed at the base of the national emblem of India?" (which he had to use a lifeline to answer). His story starts off as a little boy living on the streets with his brother, Salim. When tragedy strikes their small family, they are left to fend for themselves and end up joining forces with a young girl, Latika.
The trio's story takes them from living on their own to living in a complex where they go out and beg daily and learn to sing (because singing beggars earn double). But that life doesn't turn out to be as good as they thought it was and the three of them run off. As the story progresses, a rift forms between Salim and Jamal. Latika is caught in the middle of it and Jamal ends up losing touch with both characters.
I have to say, the acting was pretty solid, for all six actors (three characters with three actors, one in each time frame). The adult Jamel was played by Patel, while the teenage version was Tanay Chheda and the youngest was Ayush Mahesh Khedekar. Salim was portrayed by Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail (7 years-old), Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala (aged 13) and Madhur Mittal (18). Latika's three actresses were Freida Pinto (18), Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar (13) and Rubiana Ali as the youngest. While there were a few times when the accents were a bit thick and hard to understand, these were few and far between. But this was typically a problem for the middle actors anyway since the youngest ones didn't know English and used subtitles and the older actors were a lot more clear. Along with these six actors, the part of the TV show's host, Prem Kumar, is played by one of the biggest names in Indian movies, Anil Kapoor, and his acting is really good. He felt just like the Indian equivalent of Regis Philbin.
Special features include a montage of the film put to Indian music, a series of random video clips of Indian culture put to what I can only describe as Indian Techno. One of the exclusive features on the Blu-ray version of Slumdog Millionaire is a 40 minute short film called "Manjha" about a boy who works on making kite string, and quite frankly feels like a college student's class project or something that would show up in an independent film festival. There is also a Script-to-Screen version of Jamal's first question and a 20+ minute-long making-of featurette that talks about everything from casting, filming and the ending dance sequence.
While I definitely recommend seeing Slumdog Millionaire (it is a good love story, after all), I'm not sure there is enough here to warrant the extra cost that comes with the Blu-ray version of the film. While the picture is nice and crisp, that really just means you get to see the dirty slums that much better. But then again there are quite a few extras on this version that don't appear on the DVD.
