Dev Patel is angry.
Judging from Monkey Man—which he co-wrote, produced, directed, and stars in—he’s angry about extreme income inequality, the manipulation of religion by political leaders, police brutality, and the abuse of marginalized communities, especially as all of this is experienced in contemporary India. But rather than express this frustration via a prominent op-ed or even a documentary, he’s chosen to make an ultra-violent revenge movie, something like John Wick (which is name-checked here) with a sociopolitical heart.
Patel plays “Kid,” a bare-knuckle fighter who throws matches for meager money in a squalid arena in a fictional Indian city (the movie was shot in Mumbai). For reasons that aren’t clear for quite some time—plotting and characterization aren’t the film’s strong suits—Kid embarks on an elaborate plan to infiltrate a criminal syndicate based in a luxury hotel. Among the power players who get involved in one way or another: a political candidate (modeled, one presumes, after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi); an influential spiritual leader; and the head of the police. The latter, played by Sikandar Kher, not only appears in a handful of knock-down, drag-out, bone-crushing fights with Kid, but also in traumatic flashbacks to the state-sanctioned land grab of Kid’s village when he was a boy, during which his mother was gruesomely murdered.
I suppose all of this means that Kid, if not Patel, exercises a righteous sort of anger. But the violence is still hard to stomach, swinging as it does from harsh realism to giddy creativity (there’s a literal twist of the knife that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a movie before). And because Patel wants to pull out every camera trick in the book—including the same sort of first-person, VR whiplash effect that plagued the recent Road House remake—the action scenes are as exhausting as they are audacious. Kudos to Patel for not making a dull vanity project for his feature directorial debut, but Monkey Man is still a rough watch of its own kind.
(4/5/2024)
