Monkey Man
A raw and bloody directorial debut from leading man Dev Patel.
Monkey Man comes out of the corner swinging: an action/revenge movie with a lot of ideas on its mind and a lot of blood on its fists, a raw directorial debut from its lead star and cowriter, Dev Patel. Patel’s nameless protagonist (the script calls him Kid) is an underground boxer playing the part of a heel with a monkey mask; he earns money by throwing fights, with the promise of bonuses if he bleeds on the mat. The Kid’s work is fueled by his desire for revenge against the corrupt officials who murdered his mother and left him with a pair of scarred hands and a heart full of rage. He won’t rest until he’s brought down the man he deems responsible for his tragic past.
The film tells its story with a restlessness to match its main character, including point-of-view shots that occasionally place the viewer directly in the Kid’s shoes during the action. The stunt work is solid but scrappy, captured by a handheld camera that hugs the ground in a defensive crouch, darting around the fighters as they throw punches. Even when we’re watching the Kid fight from a third-person point of view, the movie makes a point of bringing the camera’s eye directly into the middle of the fracas, making us participants in the fight. The action is brutal and shaky, almost a rejection of the clean lines and clear cuts of John Wick (which the script name-drops at one point) or Fury Road. Patel makes certain to keep the most violent parts of the action in the frame, but the swifter punches and kicks are hard to keep track of in the melee. We’ll do it quick and dirty, the movie seems to say, and while we’re at it, we’ll try a little bit of everything.
The desire to experiment with the camera, to use several clashing angles on the same fight, and to directly reference every major influence leaves the movie feeling spread thin at times. Characters are introduced and stick around just long enough that when they eventually drop from the narrative, their exits seem to be missing from the plot. There’s precious little chance for the characters to get to know each other beyond meaningful looks, save for a crucial wordless training montage in which the Kid finally finds something to fight for besides himself. Because the film is stuffed with so much, each introduction struggles to assert itself amongst every other new development, which leaves the supporting cast competing for screen time.
At the same time, Monkey Man displays its conscience openly, signaling its heroes and villains as plainly as though they are players in legends and folktales. Patel wastes no time getting to the point: the Kid is a character who has been wronged and is fighting to bring justice—first for himself, then for the marginalized—to evildoers. He acts as a sort of avatar for Hanuman, a Hindu monkey god blessed with divine strength. The film presents the Kid as a player in an endless cycle of wrongdoing and divine retribution, perpetuated by those who have enough power to do justice but choose to abuse their power instead. In so doing, Monkey Man positions itself on the side of scrappy justice against religious power that’s been shored up through hypocritical means. The camera keeps providing glimpses of the poor and the dispossessed in the literal edges of the frame: it won’t forget about the marginalized, and it won’t let us forget, either, even when the Kid must ascend literal towers full of the rich and powerful in order to achieve his goal.
The film’s loyalty to the downtrodden is more than just lip service. The film makes a point of allying itself not just with the poor, but also with a group of hijra (third gender) characters who have been driven from their homes to take sanctuary in a temple. This loyalty is a definitive statement that actually means something in today’s cultural climate of discrimination against trans people. The leader of the hijra group (Vipin Sharma) tells the Kid that they’ve been rejected from society because they are “different.” It is true that they are different, but the line is simple, a sledgehammer that obliterates all nuance. Hijra people have a long history in Indian culture beyond simply being “other.” Here, they are helpful allies and a useful storytelling symbol, both more and less than the caricatures that their oppressors would make them out to be.
Though the text consists primarily of fight scenes between individual characters, the subtext is an engagement with the forces of colonialism, religion, and religious nationalism, especially regarding the ways that favoring one religious in-group can lead to the oppression of minorities. Patel’s film loves India and hates that Hindu nationalism has been co-opted to favor a select few. One shot in particular, of a portrait being splashed with blood, feels like a direct refutation of the nationalist overtones of 2022’s RRR. Touches like this make the boiled-down structure of the plot somewhat disappointing because the film clearly has a lot on its mind, but only so many words that it is willing to use to come out and say it. The effect is numbing, and by the end, we already know what the film is going to tell us.
Just as the themes of Monkey Man are cyclical, so too is its plot: we learn about the Kid’s past in repeated flashbacks. Each flashback brings with it a little more information, but the revelations come with the same information we’ve been told before, explicitly in dialogue and implicitly in imagery: injustice and justice, in a repetitive cycle. The film’s point is that injustice should be rejected, thoroughly and violently; the lack of restraint is the whole point. I respect the swings that Patel takes here, and far be it from me to ask a revenge movie to be subtle, but Monkey Man could have used a little more finesse.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆
Monkey Man is in theaters now.