‘Monkey Man’ Review
There’s always something refreshing about seeing an action movie wear its influences on its sleeve while instilling a unique and exhilarating perspective. That’s the case with Dev Patel’s directorial debut Monkey Man, which has been lovingly referred to as “John Wick in Mumbai” and whose influences run the gamut of international action cinema royalty. However, through its ambitious attempts to be sociopolitical and a non-stop thrill ride, it struggles to find a distinct voice. In its wake is a stylistically and thematically muddled but still pulse-pounding action film that is willing to go the extra mile in every regard but suffers greatly due to its lack of restraint.
In Mumbai's darker recesses, the Kid (Patel) navigates its murky waters between intentionally losing fights as the titular Monkey Man so his bookie, Tiger (Sharlto Copley), can keep his underground fight club operation afloat. He gets a little money for his services but will have to bleed if he wants a bigger cut. Increasingly desperate to get closer to the spiritual guru Baba Shakti (Makrand Deshpande), whose desire for power and land caused his village to be burned to the ground and his mother to be massacred by Chief of Police Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher), Kid hatches a plan that will put him on a path of vengeance. The question is not whether he has the determination but whether he has the focus and resolve to achieve his goal or if his fate is to be knocked around for money for the rest of his life.
There’s a ramshackle nature to Kid’s plan that meshes with Patel’s action direction throughout Monkey Man. With many handheld shots combined with wider shots that suddenly become claustrophobic, it always feels like a powder keg about to explode. It can be disorienting at times as the action moves from scene to scene, and the camera seems to struggle to keep up with the action, but it injects the film with a kinetic energy that makes up for some of its other missteps. There’s a propulsive nature to Patel’s direction, and he very rarely lets the action let up once it has begun, always spilling out into a new location almost as quickly as it can. Punctuated by flashes of violence, it’s got style, and the camerawork is genuinely fun while the action scenes are in the spotlight. It’s the kind of go-for-broke approach that is endearing while also running the risk of fumbling its execution, though Patel handles it better than you might expect from a first-time director.
Where Monkey Man begins to lose focus is in its sociopolitical commentary and over-reaching to subject matter that feels more like a late-minute addition to the screenplay than crucial to its narrative. It’s in the way Monkey Man begins that its structure is obvious as a younger Kid (Jatin Malik) is told the story of Hanuman, a Hindu deity who seeks to satisfy his hunger and inadvertently faces the gods' ire. It serves as the template for Paul Angunawela and John Collee’s screenplay and adheres to it with a modern spin. These updates, though, are a lot. There’s a subsection of the film centered around the hijra community - which tends to include transgender, intersex, and eunuch people - that is hinted at existing in the background before becoming the focus. The problem is it’s not worked into the script enough to avoid feeling disjointed. The film struggles to make any of its subtext matter beyond taking Patel’s character and propping him up as a messiah-of-sorts intended to help the downtrodden, exiled, and impoverished.
There’s a mythic quality to Kid’s arc that is telegraphed in the film’s structure. The film reflects on moments that define Kid while working on defining who he will be. It becomes riddled with flashbacks and philosophical musings that never feel necessary because the film doesn’t do enough with any of them. It’s a story of revenge, and it tries to imbue that revenge with a symbolic nature that is both predictable and underwritten. What it does do though, is introduce some of the hardships faced in India’s past and present to Western audiences that may have absolutely no idea about what is even happening in India. There’s a novelty to being exposed to something through a familiar template, where you can rely on what you know of the genre’s familiar trappings to spend time untangling the sociopolitical context of the film. Monkey Man provides a fresh perspective to its well-worn utilization of action staples, and even if it doesn’t ever come together as neatly as it should, it’s worth making the effort to try and convey something new.
It all comes back to Patel’s vision for the film, which isn’t a hopeless and bleak depiction of reality like some of the influences he invokes tend to be. There’s a hope inherent to Kid’s arc, and there’s a scrappiness and heart that Patel instills in Kid that keeps the journey exciting enough. The momentum can wane, but Patel’s performance is the baseline for the film that leads to an unsurprisingly fun performance. Movies like Michael Winterbottom’s The Wedding Guest and David Lowery’s The Green Knight always felt like they gave Patel a chance to shine as an action star but never gave him the action necessary to do so. So there was something exciting about seeing Patel direct himself in this and push himself into the role nobody seemed interested in giving him. The result is a magnetic performance that showcases his versatility as an actor while letting him sweat and bleed for his art like the rest of his peers. For a directorial debut, Patel leaves little on the table in order to bring a fresh perspective to tried-and-true action tropes.
