Ever wonder how much luck is involved in the success of the average quiz show winner? Sure, being a brainiac doesn’t hurt, but no matter how much you know, unless the Venn diagram of your knowledge and those questions has significant overlap, you’re done and luck trumps preparation. If Ken Jennings’ first Jeopardy! appearance had the set of questions from the day on which he eventually lost, instead of being the most famous game show contestant in history, he might just be some nerdy computer programmer from Utah you never heard of. But what if you got on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, and every question you got, by pure coincidence, had a tie-in to a specific event in your life, fate putting the fix in so that you were only asked questions your life had been preparing you to answer? If you’re a poor 18-year-old kid from the Muslim slums of Mumbai who grew up as an orphan and a grifter, it means you get to your final, 20 million rupee question and are hauled off by the cops on suspicion of fraud.

That’s where Jamal, the titular “slumdog” finds himself at the opening of Slumdog Millionaire, being tortured mercilessly by two unsavory lawmen attempting to get him to fess up to just how he got to the final question on the notoriously difficult Indian version of the famous game show. Once they quit slapping him around, Jamal begins to tell his story, which unfolds in two interlocking sets of flashbacks: one to his life growing up with his ne’er-do-well brother after the death of his mother, the other to his nerve-wracking run on the previous night’s taping of the show. As the cops go over the tape with him question by question, Jamal tells stories from his past that explain exactly how he knew the answers. And if that’s all the movie was, it would be a pretty tedious and predictable affair, but screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) takes considerable liberties with the novel on which the film is based. These two sets of flashbacks aren’t the whole story at all. Both lead to a cleverly constructed convergence around the great unrequited love of Jamal’s life, a girl (Latika) he meets while he’s still a young boy. They’re both street urchins scamming money for a Fagin-like boss who uses the kids ruthlessly.