Ghetto grit tarted up in MTV gloss, Danny Boyle’s Oscar sweeper Slumdog Millionaire is pretty much a Bollywood movie for people who don’t watch Bollywood movies. The plot, based on the novel Q & A by Indian writer Vikas Swarup, is an easy-sell no-brainer for big screen adaptation: 18-year-old former street urchin Jamal Malik (Dev Patel, from TV’s Skins) enters Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – only to surprise both host Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) and the audience by practically slaying the game. Suspected of cheating, he’s brutally interrogated by the police. Skipping back and forth in time, the film unfolds with the events leading up to the game show, where Jamal has spent most of his youth homeless and on the run. The plot’s central idea is undeniably absurd – Jamal’s knowledge of the answers stems from key moments of his past – but the film sprints out of the gate with such kinetic vigour, like some sort of wild Dickensian Masala adventure, that it’s hard to resist its surface pleasures, at least for a while. But once you get over the novelty of the premise, it’s staggeringly ordinary stuff that loses momentum halfway through and resorts to recycling run-of-the-mill crime conventions.