Thoughts on Monkey Man

    Last week I went to see Monkey Man, Dev Patel’s directorial debut in which he stars as Kid, a guy in India wanting revenge for his mother’s death by infiltrating the gangster world as a waiter, in a luxury brothel where corrupt politicians and police hang out at, and already having been an underground fighter who does matches in an ape mask to protect his identity (as do the other fighters donning animal masks, in a lucha libre kind of way in hiding their faces). It’s very inspired by John Wick (the movie even namedrops the John Wick movies when Kid is trying to buy a gun), and has this very red, neon look to it of the backstreets of the fictional city of Yatana, like in the back alleys of restaurants where servers smoke and feed scraps to stray dogs.

    He works his way around gangsters, befriending a sex worker who works as a high-class escort for rich club patrons, and after he has a mid-movie defeat, builds himself back up again with the help of the keeper of the temple of Ardhanarishvara and a group of transwomen in the hijra community (transgender people who live in communities that follow a kinship system known as guru-chela system), and getting back to training and punching at a bag of basmati rice, fighting not just for himself but for marginalized people too.

    The movie is two hours long, and I felt it could have been 90 minutes, as I felt bored in parts and was losing interest in the story. I also really don’t like the trope of “woman in male hero’s life is brutally attacked or murdered, so hero goes on vengeance killing spree,” it’s played out.

    But besides those two gripes, I thought the movie was all right. Dev Patel has come a long way from playing stringbean awkward dorks, now has a more regal handsome look, and wanted to make a movie where he’s the badass action hero, so good on him for that. I liked the red cinematography, and while I felt the fight scenes would have a choppiness that felt unnecessary, there were some cool sequences to watch, including a scene with a knife in an elevator that felt way more visceral and intense to see. The movie seemed very steeped in Indian culture, like the repeated references to Hanuman, a Hindu deity of a monkey man in folk tales that Kid deeply relates to from childhood stories his mother would tell to him.

    So it was a decent movie, more like a B-level action movie with a prestige star having fun with his own crime film.