Mumbai’s King (Manjeet Singh, 2012): India

Reviewed by Mikael Myggen. Seen at the Metro Theater, Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Ever wanted to watch Slumdog Millionaire minus the millionaire part, and any resemblance of a plot? Look no further than Mumbai’s King, by Manjeet Singh.

I’m not gonna beat around the bush; this movie sucks. It’s really bad. It’s a shame too, because there are some things that are good about the movie. For one, the picture actually looks pretty good, and bright colors are extenuated throughout the movie. India is shown pretty much exactly how it’s shown in almost all films, impoverished as hell. Trash liters the streets, kids run around on the roofs of buildings instead of the dirty roads, lifestock wanders all over the place, and many people are seen wearing hand-me-down clothes. This generates some mild interest early on, but unfortunately mild interest is not enough to carry a movie.

What I can gather from the plot is that there are these two boys who are poor, and one of them has an abusive dad. They sell balloons. That’s it. The movie tries to take a sort of home-video approach to story telling, where events are happening one after the other with no real bearing on each other, and it just makes for a really boring and uninteresting result. The dad is never really dealt with throughout the entirety of the film, which sort of makes me question why he’s even put there to begin with. If the goal was to frustrate with viewer by forcing them to watch unstoppable domestic abuse, then congratulations, I’m frustrated.

The most interesting scene I can remember is the one pictured above, where one kid is distracting a potato vendor while the other steals his potatoes. It’s sort of clever and creates some suspense as he takes the potatos, but at best, this scene is just “good”, not great. It seems that the creator of the film really liked this scene, as it seems to be the centerpiece in the limited amount of information on this film that I could find.

Also, I feel it worth mentioning that this was the only film I saw during the film festival where I actually fell asleep. I had plenty of sleep from the night before, but having to watch this slow-paced film about nothing for 77 minutes really took it’s toll on me. I think I was out for around ten minutes. I woke up again a little bit before it ended, and while the ending was ridiculous and stupid to me then, I’m pretty sure I would have felt the same if I had payed attention all the way through.

Don’t see Mumbai’s King. Just watch Slumdog Millionaire again.