www.millionsthemovie.co.uk
Dir: Danny Boyle
Cast: Alex Edel, Lewis McGibbon, James Nesbitt, Daisy Donovan
Kids find stolen cash
spend it or give it to poor
but thief wants it back
Millions reveals a much lighter side to Danny Boyle after the heroin junkies of Trainspotting and the rage-fuelled zombies of 28 Days Later. It tells the story of two brothers who move house with their father (Nesbitt) after the death of their mother. The younger brother Damian (Edel) is obsessed with Saints and imagines conversations with them whilst he plays in his makeshift den by the railway line. Then one afternoon a holdall of cash drops from the sky. Along with his brother Anthony (McGibbon) the two of them must decide what to do with the loot which Damian believes is a gift from God, and within a short space of time as the country is about to switch to the Euro... but of course there's a more sinister reason behind the kids' good fortune and somebody wants their money back. It's an interesting premise and the screenplay by Frank Cottrell-Boyce works best in the first half of the movie when we follow Damian's naive efforts to give cash to the poor. Sadly it's let down by some muddled plotting once the adults get involved and it's never really clear exactly who is doing what with the cash and what the consequences are - and it finishes with a horribly ambiguous ending. A film of this nature stands or falls by the quality of its young actors and thankfully both McGibbon and Edel are excellent here, especially the latter with his wide-eyed innocence and his will to do good. Nesbitt's role is wisely kept to a back seat and he's joined in a questionable piece of casting by Daisy Donovan (from C4's The 11 O'Clock Show) as a charity worker who gets involved with family. Where Millions does succeed is in reminding us just how exciting a talent Danny Boyle is and yet again he delivers the goods. The film is full of visual flair, from the opening scene in which a new house constructs itself around the two boys, to a re-enactment of a robbery using toys, intercut with heavily-saturated footage of the real thing accompanied by Muse blasting away on the soundtrack. Whilst elements of the plot echo Boyle's debut of Shallow Grave, the feel of this film is far more in tune with A Life Less Ordinary with its skewed approach to religious icons and overall joie de vivre.
soulmining rating: ***
1 comment:
I saw this film back when it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival and I loved it. It showed how Danny Boyle is really a jack of all trades when it comes to different genres in film. While it is easy with a film like this to really rely on the cute kids aspect to keep it afloat, the writing in this film was more than suffiencent-even though those kids were cute....with their little accents!! *Note to self: get impregnated by a foreginer and raise cute kids with accents* Anyways, the talking Saints - from what I remember (I saw Millions last year) were very funny.
I apologize for any spelling errors, I just came back from the pub.
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