Slumdog Millionaire is a smashing, sentimental entertainment. Charles Dickens would have loved it, assuming he could have followed the stutters and time-warping pirouettes of contemporary film grammar (or any film grammar, for that matter). He surely would have been fascinated by the contemporary India where the film is set. with its grotesque extremes of wealth and poverty, its technology-fueled economic upheaval, and. not least, its casual cruelty toward children—how not unlike the industrial-age lifestyle we call Dickensian! Danny Boyle's film, about a trio of slum kids, also goes whole hog for Dickensian narrative: coincidence. reversal of fortune, pure young love, good good and bad bad. Plus the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (the working title of Great Expectations). But the plot is the only thing that’s old-fashioned. Boyle invests the film with all the verve and formal playfulness of his best movies—in my view that would be Trainspotting and 28 Days Later—and adds a new, documentary-like urgency. One example: a breathless cops-versus-urchins chase through a vast shantytown; imagine a Save the Children ad shot like a Jason Bourne movie.