Daniel Drumm

Story by Dev Patel. Screenplay by Dev Patel. Produced by Dev Patel. Directed by Dev Patel. Starring Dev Patel. And what is the end result? Well... he steals all of the film techniques he can from Danny Boyle, that's for sure. But that's all it is, it's showy director tricks like long shots, moving the camera diagonal, moving action at 1.25x speed at times to represent being coked out, sudden close ups. I will count all the mirrors at the final boss battle as merely an homage to Enter the Dragon and nothing more, but everything here feels stolen from other movies and put together in a haphazard way, wrap it up with an anti-Modi (Modi is India's Trump) message, throw on John Wick's costume for the end and call it a masterpiece. It's not. I guess kudos to Patel, a British kid who got his break from the BBC, to return to the Slumdog theme, but it feels in support of showy homages and I'm not sure it's a very confident moral message about how violence begets violence.