British director Danny Boyle, best known for dark, stylized films like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, trains his eye on the lives of children in Millions, turning in a kinetic and visually arresting but surprisingly tame family movie. While Millions isn't the insipid, condescending drivel that passes for family entertainment from mainstream Hollywood studios, it's not quite as daring and insightful as you might expect a family film from Boyle to be, either.
At least he doesn't tone down his visual style, and right away you can see that this won't be your conventional kiddie flick. Brothers Damian (Alex Etel) and Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) lie in the dirt lot that is to become their new house, and we watch the house sprout around them in a CGI fantasia. The brothers have recently lost their mother, and dad Ronnie (James Nesbitt) moves them into a new subdivision to start over. Younger, sensitive Damian is still mourning his mother's loss, and has a tendency to talk to apparitions of saints (he memorizes their names and stats like they are the soccer players all the other kids are obsessed with) to ask if they've seen his mother in heaven.
Older Anthony is the tougher, more outgoing of the two, and he plays on the sympathy of strangers to score free stuff. The simple contrast between the pair makes it easy to guess what each will want to do when they find a sack of money in an abandoned lot behind their house. Damian thinks it's from God, but it's actually loot from a robbery gone wrong, and since the film is set in the near future as England is about to change over from the pound to the euro, the brothers have only a fortnight in which to dispose of the cash. Damian wants to give it to the poor while Anthony wants to spend it on toys and gadgets, or maybe real- estate investments.
Like the old Richard Pryor comedy, Brewster's Millions, Millions has its share of fun, madcap scenes as the brothers scramble to unload their money. Boyle's device of having saints actually pop up to talk to Damian adds an effective poignancy to the proceedings, but by the last third of the film, the poignancy has overwhelmed the fun, and not in a positive way. Critics have praised Boyle for his sophisticated take on child life, but too often the plot's simplistic mechanics (especially the criminal who shows up toward the end to claim his loot) get in the way of the rich character study.
In this way, Millions is a film at odds with itself. Boyle had to make cuts to get down to a PG from a PG-13 rating, and at times his film feels more like a movie about kids targeted at adults than a kids' movie that adults can appreciate. There are funny moments, particularly from the naïve Damian, but kids may get bored with all the saints and the ruminations on religion and mortality.
Etel, in a winning performance that avoids most of the cloying cuteness to which child actors are prone, holds the film together as the wide-eyed Damian. His sense of optimism is infectious, and Damian has the power to perk up not only the other characters but the audience, as well. When Boyle is on, the movie is both heartfelt and joyous, and even if it might baffle kids at times, adults will find much to appreciate in the way it evokes the often lost optimism of childhood. If only Boyle were on for the whole film instead of sporadically, Millions would be as great as everyone says it is.