even-year-old Damian Cunningham (Etel) and his older brother, Anthony (McGibbon), are excited to be relocating to a new housing development near Manchester. On moving day, Damian, a kid obsessed with Catholic saints, tells his dad, Ronnie (Nesbitt), about how angels helped St. Ann move house. Ronnie thinks that would be handy.
Once in his family's new digs, Damian uses leftover boxes to make a fort by the railroad tracks. Sitting in his cardboard hideaway, he has a special visitor ... St. Clare of Assisi. St. Clare, resplendent in her nun's habit and CGI halo, tells Damian how much she enjoys being the patron saint of television: "It keeps me busy!" St. Clare admires Damian's fort, calling it a "hermitage." Suddenly, the fort is crushed from above by a duffel bag that Damian believes has dropped from heaven. Inside the bag is a vast amount of cash in British pound notes, which are about to be phased out in favor of the euro. Damian and Anthony haul the cash home. Anthony, a money- and investment-savvy kid, swears Damian to secrecy ... and also swears to secrecy a number of kids from their new school.
Damian is visited next by St. Francis and St. Nicholas, who encourage him to give the money to the poor. Anthony wants to invest the money in real estate. St. Peter gives Damian an eyewitness account of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, free of two millennia of hype, that will help Damian find a way to distribute the cash to those who need it most. A poor man (Fulford) stops by Damian's rebuilt fort. What does this man have to do the mysterious duffel bag? And how will Damian's divine visitors guide him through the last few days of the money's having any worth?
28 Saints Later ...
No matter one's beliefs, Millions is a touching essay on belief. Despite a number of almost Tim Burton-like fantasy sequences, Millions matter-of-factly presents the unreal intruding on the mundane in a way that feels unique among recent fantasy films. This intrusion of the unreal feels possible only through the innocent point of view of a kid; the world created by Boyle through the eyes of Damian comes across not as a contrivance made by adults, but as a genuine representation of how this particular kid sees the world. This allows Boyle and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (writer of Hilary and Jackie and 24 Hour Party People) to create utterly effortless magic realism of a kind that rarely appears successfully on film.
The cliched theme of the unimportance material goods has rarely found a better expression than the bag of soon-to-be-useless money found by Damian. It's one thing to make a film that addresses spiritual matters in favor of material concerns in a schmaltzy way. It's quite another to make a movie that deftly blends the spiritual and the grittily mundane in a way that maybe no film has done since The Exorcist.
However, Boyle and Boyce undo all their splendid work in the misconceived series of endings that comprises the final act of Millions. In the last 20 minutes of the film, resolutions are trotted out like purebreds at a dog show, and none of them is any good or even properly developed. Boyle and Boyce wrote themselves into a corner, and then made things worse with each new and sloppy ending they tried. Despite the fact that Millions is ultimately frustrating, it's still a fascinating and heartfelt film that is in no way condescending to its kid protagonist or its audience.
