DANNY Boyle looks to have a major hit on his hands with his latest movie, Slumdog Millionaire… which could even surpass the success of his seminal Trainspotting movie.

Based on Vikas Swarup’s best selling novel, Q&A, and adapted for the screen by Full Monty scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy, the film has already been a huge hit at the London Film Festival (where it was 2008’s closing film and spawned glowing reviews) and it has now been welcomed with open arms in America.

Slumdog Millionaire is the story of Jamal Malik, an 18-year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, who is about to experience the biggest day of his life.

With the whole nation watching, he is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

But when the show breaks for the night, police arrest him on suspicion of cheating; how could a street kid know so much?

Desperate to prove his innocence, Jamal tells the story of his life in the slum where he and his brother grew up, of their adventures together on the road, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of Latika, the girl he loved and lost.

According to screenwriter Beaufoy, the biggest problem with turning the novel into a film was condensing the 12 short stories that make up the book into one screenplay.

“It had no over-arching narrative,” he explains. “It didn’t take someone from birth all the way through life. It was rather disjointed and some of the stories were almost discreet little tales that had no reference to the main characters at all.

“It’s very different to starting with one’s own idea and developing it. With an adaptation you’ve got responsibilities to the book.

“It’s like unpacking a suitcase that has been delivered with a jumble of things that fit and things that don’t fit. It’s not my suitcase. It’s someone else’s suitcase. But somehow you have to turn that into a suitcase of our own making!”

Beaufoy and Boyle appear to have done just that. Slumdog Millionaire has been a huge hit with critics and looks set to go down a storm with audiences too.

US reaction

Among the fanfare of approval from the States, the Washington Post said: “Like all good fairy tales, this outsize celebration of perseverance and moral triumph contains within it a deeper idea – in this case, the relative nature of what we think we know, and what’s worth knowing at all.”

While The Globe and Mail stated: “Slumdog Millionaire is skillful entertainment, with the simple message that the most intense life experiences yield the greatest education.”

The Los Angeles Times opined: “The best old-fashioned audience picture of the year, a Hollywood-style romantic melodrama that delivers major studio satisfactions in an ultra-modern way.”

And Entertainment Weekly wrote: “Slumdog Millionaire is nothing if not an enjoyably far-fetched piece of rags-to-riches wish fulfillment. It’s like the Bollywood version of a Capra fable sprayed with colorful drops of dark-side-of-the-Third-World squalor.”

USA Today, meanwhile, stated: “The beautifully rendered and energetic tale celebrates resilience, the power of knowledge and the vitality of the human experience. Horrifying, humorous and life-affirming, it is, above all, unforgettable.”

And Roger Ebert, of The Chicago Sun-Times raved: “This is a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time.”

The New York Times felt that it’s “a gaudy, gorgeous rush of colour, sound and motion”, adding that “Slumdog Millionaire doesn’t travel through the lower depths, it giddily bounces from one horror to the next”.

Rolling Stone even predicted an Academy Award shot, stating: “Slumdog Millionaire has the goods to bust out as a scrappy contender in the Oscar race. It’s modern India standing in for a world in full economic spin.”

Variety, meanwhile, wrote: “Boyle and Beaufoy, working from a novel by Vikas Swarup, uninsistently make the case that the most useful intelligence, in all its forms, comes from life experience.*

And The Wall Street Journal rounds off this overview with the conclusion: “There’s never been anything like this densely detailed phantasmagoria – groundbreaking in substance, damned near earth-shaking in style.”

Slumdog Millionaire opens in UK cinemas on January 9, 2009

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