Here’s a movie that is half Bollywood, a quarter Hollywood and a quarter the Danny Boyle of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave. It’s a fantasy with realist stud marks, full of energy, colour and, frankly, cliché.

According to American reviewers, some of whom have unwisely compared it to the work of Charles Dickens, it’s a sure thing for Oscar nominations. They are probably right, but I’m not so sure about its worth as anything more than the enjoyable telling of a good story.

It does, however, deliver a masterclass for the alumni of Bollywood on how to direct such a piece of entertainment without falling into total bathos.

Clearly Boyle, in telling his tale of a slum boy who becomes a TV contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and then gets accused of cheating, thinks Mumbai is a city where hope springs eternal, and thus a life-enhancing mixture of the rich and poor, the criminal and the upright.

That, after the terrorist sacking of the Taj Hotel — one of its favourite landmarks, which Boyle cannot have even guessed at as his film was being made — may make the movie as popular in India as in America. But the director’s view is more than a little rose-tinted as Jamal, his slum boy (gravely and beautifully played by Londoner Dev Patel as a grown-up and by Tanay Hemant Chheda and Ayush Mahesh Khedekar as a boy), attempts to win the competition and his girl.

Romantic fairytales don’t come more full-bloodedly feelgood than this one. We get properly started with Jamal as an 18-year-old orphan, one question away from winning 20 million rupees on the show, with Anil Kapoor as the Indian equivalent of Chris Tarrant. The programme comes to an end before the question can be asked, and Jamal is taken off by the police, who suspect he is using a system, and brutally interrogate him.

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We then discover that each successful answer relates to key episodes in Jamal’s life, which Boyle takes us through, bit by bit. After his mother has been killed in a religious riot, he and Salim, his elder brother, have to live by their wits, falling in with a gang who maim and blind street kids to make them profitable beggars. They escape but Salim (played by three Indian actors as the story progresses) reverts to criminality while Jamal goes to work in a telephone call centre. All the time, however, Jamal remembers Latika (also played by three actors), the little orphan girl he grew to love while sheltering from the Mumbai rains. Finding she’s married to a gangster, he still refuses to give up.

All this and more is shot vividly and with great attention to lighting and detail in the bustling, over-populated metropolis by Anthony Dod Mantle, who, along with production designer Mark Digby, does deserve an Oscar nomination. And it is directed by Boyle and his Indian co-director, Loveleen Tandan, with some vigour and skill. They clearly believe in this depiction of Mumbai life even if I don’t. Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay, taken from the novel Q and A by Vikas Swarup, doesn’t let the general approach down, and occasionally shows his own take on the proceedings, as when Jamal has a banter with a Scots customer at the call centre.

Slumdog Millionaire does not lack humour. It is fast-paced, well-edited into shape and with just enough hard-nosed reality to make at least some sense of the fantasy, though the whole episode of our slumboy falling into a pit of excreta and then managing to get himself introduced to the Indian acting legend Amitabh Bachchan (played by Feroz Abbas Khan, not the superstar himself, who actually has the Tarrant job in India) is ludicrously overdone.

But then fantasy is what this is, and, despite the fierce and truthful-looking playing of Irrfan Khan as the police inspector charged with extracting the truth from Jamal, the film is ultimately lacking in a resonance that would make us think rather than simply laugh and possibly cry.

It seems entirely appropriate that it should end with a silly Bollywood dance that sends all seriousness right out of the window. But perhaps, as an old India hand, I have seen too much of that sort of thing. What I did appreciate is AR Rahman’s music. That’s Bollywood at its best, rather than its daftest.

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