LYT's Weblog

"To break it down: You've got two groups of bad guys (powerful faceless mob types and juvenile-delinquent jackasses with guns), one morally ambiguous hostage (Pollack), and a negotiator primarily concerned with his own family (Willis). You know it'll have to end badly for someone. Hostage, it turns out, works out pretty well, unless you were expecting a feel-good actioner."

CityBeat review of MILLIONS:

�Trainspotting� director Danny Boyle�s biggest strength has always been his desire to challenge himself. At times, his experimental instincts can flop spectacularly (�A Life Less Ordinary�), but more often, he hits the mark, as with the low budget zombie horror �28 Days Later�. With �Millions�, he tries for the first time to make a family film, and, unbelievably, it works. Young Damian (newcomer Alexander Nathan Etel) is a 7-year-old with an active imagination, who studies the Catholic saints in the kind of minute detail that most boys lavish upon sports heroes. When he moves to a newly built housing project, vivid visions of the saints routinely come to him, and when a bag full of money drops from the sky, he naturally assumes it�s from God.

Obviously it isn�t. Damian�s older, more pragmatic brother Anthony (Lewis Owen McGibbon) wants to spend the money on luxury items, but Damian hopes to distribute it amongst the poor, only to find out that such a task isn�t as easy as it sounds. Meanwhile, there�s a 13-day deadline in effect -- Britain is due to switch from the pound to the euro come New Year�s, and traditional hard currency will be useless after that. Not to mention the fact that the man who stole the money in the first place (Christopher Fulford) is hot on its trail.

Essentially, then, this plays like a PG-rated version of Boyle�s �Shallow Grave� -- nobody dies, and the children�s fantasies are brought to vivid life along the way. In the hands of a deep-pocketed studio, the premise could easily turn into crap like �Blank Check�, but Boyle resists easy sentimentality and amps up the fantasy and magic realism elements to make the proceedings feel, in the best sense of the word, like a modern day fairy tale. Some parents may not feel that he rebukes theft strongly enough, but hey, this is fantasy after all.

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