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Spirited ‘Millions’ worth every penny

‘Trainspotting’ director Danny Boyle heads in a new direction
/ Source: The Associated Press

With the energy of “Trainspotting” (minus the rampant drugs and sex) and “28 Days Later” (minus the gore and rabid zombies), director Danny Boyle makes a surprisingly gentle turn into the family genre with the big-hearted “Millions.”

While some of the themes might be a bit heavy for young children, Boyle has crafted a generally tender tale with a buoyant sense of magical realism and a sneaky little moral lesson on greed vs. altruism and acceptance vs. denial.

The film features delightful screen debuts by Alex Etel and Lewis McGibbon as brothers momentarily distracted from grief over their mother’s death when a suitcase packing nearly half a million dollars in British pounds lands in their laps.

The manic pacing truly does mirror that of Boyle’s “Trainspotting” and “28 Days Later” while utterly lacking in the sardonic mean-spiritedness that sometimes underlies those films or the director’s “Shallow Grave” and TV film “Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise.”

Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, a frequent collaborator with director Michael Winterbottom, “Millions” centers on 7-year-old dreamer Damian (Etel) and his 9-year-old brother, Anthony (McGibbon).

After their mother’s death, the boys are uprooted by their father, Ronnie (James Nesbitt), from their old flat to start over in a crisp new housing tract in the British countryside.

Anthony handles the transition and his mother’s death with stoic resilience, while Ronnie preoccupies himself with pragmatic matters of raising two boys on his own and eventually, new romance with a chirpy charity worker (Daisy Donovan).

A prepubescent mystic, Damian obsesses on unanswerable questions about his mother’s death. He has humorous yet touching visions of saints — Peter, Francis of Assisi, even a chain-smoking St. Clare — asking each in their turn about the mysteries of life and whether, in their travels, they have encountered his mother in heaven. None of the saints have.

When a suitcase full of cash falls from the sky into the cardboard-box hideout Damian has constructed beside some railroad tracks, he begins using the money for saintly deeds, doling it out to people who seem in need.

Anthony takes a practical approach to the cash, setting himself up as top dog at his new school.

This manna from heaven comes with two catches. First, Britain finally is ending its holdout on adopting the Euro, so within a week, the pound notes need to be converted or they will become worthless. Second, a sinister character inevitably turns up to claim the money as his own, threatening the boys unless the cash is returned.

“Millions” tears by at a spirited clip, braced by clever visual effects and the sort of rapid yet artsy editing that characterizes other Boyle films.

For all its whimsy, the film remains very rooted in the real world, adding more menace to its darker moments than you normally would expect in a PG-rated film.

By the end, “Millions” spins to wild fancy, the conclusion coming as almost too capricious. Still, “Millions” is a rare family film that entertains enormously while presenting painless and substantive lessons in life’s authentic pangs and joys.