I’m no statistician. And I don’t put much stock in luck. But if I’m trying to find a childhood pal in a city of 13 million — and accomplish it – I’d say my luck is tapped out. If I proceed to then go on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” it’s almost guaranteed I’m going to trip up on the first question. Even if they ask what my favorite color is.

Amazing odds for scrappy young Jamal Malik, the main character in “Slumdog Millionaire,” could be overlooked. Trouble is, the problem with “Slumdog Millionaire” is a strange pair of tacked-on prejudices.

In the book, the main character, who has a three-part, Hindu, Muslim and Christian name, is orphaned from birth and later almost molested by a priest. In the movie, the main character, Jamal, is Muslim. His mother is unexplainably killed by a Hindu horde. And the adult huckster who nearly fatally takes advantage of Jamal? Hindu.

Also disheartening is the Madonna-fication of the love interest, Latika, who is originally introduced as working in a brothel Jamal visits. In the movie, she is a fellow slumdog, later kidnapped by a gangster who plans to auction off her virginity. So, an audience will cheer for a boy who, locked in an outhouse early on, will jump into the toilet and swim out — but if he dares pay for sex, we will neither look kindly on him nor the girl he was interested in scromping.

Safe and test-grouped is not what I expect from Danny Boyle. I expect stealth from my feel-good films. Like “Trainspotting,” “Millions,” and “A Life Less Ordinary” — all Boyle in high form. Like “Slumdog Millionaire,” they all appear, on the surface, to center around huge, improbable piles of cash. All four are really about dealing with basic human loneliness — how gutter punks turn to junk, a motherless boy turns to saints, and, in the last two, how a custodian and a tea-fetcher can find twoo wuv.

But if that’s true, why — and this is no spoiler, unless you haven’t read the title of this movie — do we require both the love and the millions?

The movie doesn’t worry about that, as it’s busy throwing Jamal from one fantastical spot of luck to the next. He’s flung from a train, but lands at the Taj Mahal, where tourists are dumbly eager to give money to him as a bluffing tour guide. He asks his lady love to meet him at a Mumbai train station whose trains regularly pack 15 people into one square meter; with no spot specified, they somehow manage to meet up. This is a lot of deus ex machina — even for this polytheistic setting.

Add a muddying with gimmicky cinematography — quick cuts, unnecessary tilts and a plot line that looks like a poorly hemmed sleeve — indicating the kind of lack of patience and confidence in the source material you’d expect from Uwe Boll. With all this un-Steadicam, the audience is inclined to forget to care about what turns out to be the central question of the movie — why is he on “Millionaire” to begin with?

It’s not that Boyle’s classics have something “Slumdog Millionaire” hasn’t — it’s that, in “Slumdog,” it’s too loaded down with frills. There’s lots of good stuff in this movie. But, like in the teeming slums of Mumbai, it’s too easily lost in the fray.