Monkey Man

dir: Dev Patel

2024

I dunno – I think the argument about who should be the next James Bond’s just been settled.

Not only should Dev Patel play Bond next, he makes a strong case for directing the next Bond film as well.

That’s not meant as any disrespect to the other (pseudo) fan frontrunner, which is what certain chumps have been saying about Idris Elba for the last twenty years. The absolute truth is there is no way Barbara Broccoli would agree to either of them playing the role, lest she be hung at the Tower of London by a lynch mob made up of the last gasps of British colonialism made up of Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the ghost of Prince Phillip and Rishi Sunak, ironically enough.

Nah, if anything he’s now overqualified.

He made this flick for $10mill, which is practically unheard of. And to the dinguses that will accuse him of ripping off the John Wick franchise, I tell you not only do they have their math wrong, they have zero knowledge of action movie history if they think the genre started and ended with Keanu fucking Reeves.

In many ways it’s an anti-John Wick revenge-inflected action flick. It’s specifically set in India (though mostly filmed in Indonesia), unlike the international cosmopolitanism of the world of assassins that populates that other franchise. The main character has been planning to take his revenge against the awful people who murdered his mother for years, to the exclusion of all else. To do so he has struggled for years to forge and maintain connections with all the sorts of people considered to be worthless and sub-human.

And in order to achieve his goals, he has to forge even more connections with people considered to be lower than the Dalits, or the so-called caste of humans considered to be ‘untouchable’.

Castes aren’t real, but Indian society still doesn’t accept that yet.

Who is our main character? He doesn’t have a name beyond Kid or Bobby, which is a name he appropriates from the side of a bleach based powder cleaner. Kid suffices.

He knows his enemies, and has known them since he was the child who watched his mother brutally murdered, but he has come to know who the real person behind the extermination of the people living in his village in a forest was – being a so-called Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), an apparent holy man who’s really, get this, an absolute piece of shit. He’s all meditate on this, pray on that, but let me have people murdered so I can build a bigger ashram.

And he has political power too, though he’s all shucks like, nah, not little old me, you’re all the stars, you guys are great.

Beneath him is an even bigger piece of shit being a corrupt police chief on his payroll, Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher), whose greatest crime could also be only having one earring in his left earlobe, in this, the year of our Lord (Shiva, god of death) 2024, and not 1983.

Beneath him, sort of, is the vicious proprietor of a club that seems to cater to the rich and powerful, which means the worst of the worst and the most depraved. It is not so much a club, or a brothel, or a hotel so much as a place where the wealthy can be helped to commit more crimes in a swanky and salubrious environment.

That proprietor is Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalshekar), and she is so gloriously foul-mouthed that I secretly wished, if only for a moment, that she wasn’t a complete monster, and that she would realise the error of her ways and align her interests with those of our hero, in order to make amends for all the harm she’s previously caused.

But then I remembered that she does all that human sex trafficking, and then realised she had to die painfully like the other villains too. Even if it made me sad to know there’d be no-one to call people “goatfuckers” anymore.

Sad face emoji.

But where and how does someone stateless, moneyless, casteless, hopeless get the abilities to take down his enemies, and access to the elite, in order to exact vengeance.

Well, it’s not a great plan, at least not initially. The Kid dons a monkey mask, to honour his mother, and the stories she used to delight him with when he was a child, of that rascal of the gods being Hanuman, and his cheeky, godly ways, and fights in underground fights but always loses.

Now I don’t pretend to know that much about Hindu deities, since there are literally thousands of them, but I do know of some other monkey gods, so when I found out that Hanuman was probably the basis for Sun Wukong, or Monkey, the beloved protagonist of the weird Japanese tv show with characters dubbed into English that I consumed voraciously as a child, well, my ticket to this flick was purchased a long time ago. My interest was peak piqued, you could say.

Well, the Kid sadly isn’t the reincarnation of the great sage, equal of heaven, and there’s no Tripitaka to keep him in line with a head-ache inducing sutra (prayer), but he is going to have to go on a mystical kind of journey in order to really unlock his full murderous potential.

Let’s not fuck about here, people. He may be noble and very handsome, but what the Kid wants is to flat out murder a bunch of people. He’s not protesting, or sending sharply worded emails, or letters to editors of newspapers written in crayon, or doing graffiti to change hearts and minds – he wants to effect real change in the world by murdering some of the people at the top in order to keep the rest in line. No, that’s not true, he wants to murder them because he lives for nothing else.

There can be no room for anything else for this chap. He’s too focused, too fucking intense. Patel displays an almost disturbing amount of intensity in this flick, and truth be told he’s pretty intense in all the flicks he does. As the lead in Lion from a bunch of years ago, he managed to make a movie about a guy using Google Maps to find his childhood village tense and uncomfortable.

Here? He’s terrifying! It’s not the cool, blank slickness of Keanu suited up and killing wave after wave of faceless goons; it’s the desperate wrath of someone whose dreamed of avenging his mother every day for the last twenty years, and he really conveys that.

The fights are well choreographed and more importantly well shot, and so much thought has been put into getting the flow right for the scenes that I really thought this is one of the stronger action flicks I’ve seen in the last couple of years, though to be fair this is not wall to wall action. It’s not in alignment with the kinds of action flicks that are being made these days, but it’s well within the wheelhouse of the flicks that were being made about 10 – 15 years ago, like the ones that The Raid was mimicking, flicks that acknowledged the Hong Kong origins of that kind of action, but adjusted / updated with new camera techniques, and a step away from the kinds of wirework we were getting a bit sick of after everything that the Matrix flicks ripped off and entailed.

Dev himself is a black belt in taekwondo, so he knows the moves, but that doesn’t always translate to being able to credibly fight on screen and make it believable.

There’s no worries there, he completely sells the brutality and the intensity.

Harkening back as I implied, yes, the beats of the story are going to be fairly familiar especially to anyone who’s watched all the flicks as far back as The Bare-Foot Kid or early Jet Li or even before then. These kinds of flicks have that mid-movie section where the protagonist fails at their attempt or nearly dies or both, and has to be taken in by a group of whoevers in order to recover and then try again.

Sometimes they even lose their memory for a while. That doesn’t happen here, but the Kid totally has to be looked after by a marginalised community in order to recover and in fact come back stronger.

I cannot tell you how much joy it brought me that the community who take him in are considered the lowest of the low, the ones most marginalised, the ones most hated, the ones with everything to lose. He is saved by a Hijra community hiding from the powers that be who attack them because no-one’s going to stand up for them. But this trans community of the marginalised stand up for him, save him, and then fight with him against the bloated, monstrous elites who make the lives of the people of Yatana a living hell.

I watch a lot of action flicks. Some I enjoy on a technical level, others for their virtuosity. Few times do I really enjoy it all on a visceral, intellectual and emotional level. For me this flick captured so many elements that were going to work great for me, but which were guaranteed to make this flick not achieve prominence in India.

Oh, no, that was never going to fly. The flicks that have been coming out of India for the last couple of years are so cornball patriotic that something like this would be seen as an affront to the ruling party and to Modi specifically. Their acceptable version of this flick would have made the protagonist the (Muslim, Pakistani) villain, the corrupt cop would be the hero and every time the fake guru was on screen he would have glowed with a holy aura.

Dev Patel gives them a film so good, so much better that what they’re churning out lately, that they probably don’t deserve it, but thankfully we do. And I’m thankful that I got to see it.

8 times Dev Patel by film’s end looks like he could punch through time itself out of 10

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“He has to be extinguished, before your nobody becomes a somebody.” - Monkey Man