Millions

(Danny Boyle, UK/US, 2004)

Can anyone be truly good? So reads the tagline to Danny Boyle’s (Trainspotting) latest film. While not exactly a gift from the cinematic heavens, thanks to Boyle’s inventive direction Millions is truly good enough to be recommended for kids and adults alike.

The story is set in motion when two young brothers come across a large sum of money thrown from a passing train. The youngest Damian (ten year-old newcomer and standout Alexander Nathan Etel), blessed with an overactive imagination, is guided by visions of saints, who “tell” him to give all the loot to the poor, much to the chagrin of his more entrepreneurial-minded brother.

While the film falls into predictability and even cliché at times, it is Boyle’s seamless fusion of hyper and magical realism that lifts Millions out of the sugary mire of cutesy kids’ films. With Damian as both the moral compass and fantastical lens through which the audience finds its footing, Boyle’s/Damian’s imagination presents us with everything from cardboard boxes as rockets, housing foundations as mansions, and even a joint-smoking saint (!).

Through computer effects, camera trickery, a pulsating soundtrack and the strategic use of sped up film, Boyle once again displays his penchant for the hyper kinetic energy that so defined Trainspotting. This time however, Boyle brilliantly replaces the smack-fuelled mindscape of pessimistic twenty-somethings with the sugar-fuelled dreamscape of an optimistic modern-day saint…for who needs a lot of heroin when one can have just a little hero?

Review by:
Gary Porter