Yes, Slumdog. I agree with the consensus complaint that it is completely contrived that Jamal knows the answers to every question because something happened in his past that informs every answer, but let me add to that by saying that the questions are all common knowledge in the first place, and it drives me insane that the questions just happen to follow the progression of his life chronologically. I mean come the fuck on.

What’s significantly worse than that, though, is that Latika has zero personality, is raped and forced into a decade of prostitution, and then everything is magically fixed when Gangster Brother says, “I hope you can forgive me”. Bathtub, guns, pew pew, etc. Everyone’s happy! Fuck that shit. Why does she even want to be with Jamal? What is going to happen? Are they going to hold hands? He doesn’t know her fucking last name!

I understand that I’m the guy who watches exploitation films with significantly more brutal abuse for significantly more abstract reasons, but that’s an entirely different paradigm predicated on shock responses. Latika seems to have been written to play the role of the sympathetic but retarded fuckdoll in a Nazisploitation film, but instead they’ve inserted her into what we are meant to believe is a serious film about true love. I think that respecting this movie is dependent upon enjoying the idea of an utterly gorgeous but completely vacuous abused woman who will fall madly in love with an ugly guy because he stalks her for long enough.

Fuck. That. Shit. …Fuck it!

Never mind that the basic premise of Good Brother/Gangster Brother/Shared Love Interest feels lifted from every other HK Triad film out there, or that the much-touted final dance sequence is like a really shitty version of the end of Kitano’s Zatoichi.

But hey, the music was good. And I liked the kid jumping into the giant vat of shit; it was like a metaphor for the rest of the movie.

[Rating: 3]