Millions - Directed by Danny Boyle
Certificate 12A
Director Danny Boyle, whose cunning zombie thriller 28 Days Later scored an enormous hit in 2002, has surprised everyone by fashioning a charming, upbeat family story – suitable for the American market – with Millions.
Ostensibly a children’s film, Millions hinged on the two sons of widowed dad Ronnie (James Nesbitt). Younger son Damian (a very fresh performance by Alex Etel, in his debut) is a seven-year-old obsessed with being good and doing good while his older brother Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) merely wants to make money.
After moving from the family home they shared with their now-dead mother, Damian makes a cardboard castle near the railway. Here, his obsession with being good dovetails with his other obsession – the life of saints – and we see saints embodied coming to visit him and answer his ethical questions.
Everything gets taken up a notch when a huge bag of money – about quarter of a million pounds – literally lands on Damian’s cardboard shack. From then on, his brother and he generate more comedy than most adults comedies can manage. Damian’s efforts to find poor people to give the money is almost as touching and funny as his brother’s too-grown-up focus on loan percentages and growth rates.
This is a film for the whole family that won’t have part of the family bored rigid.