Monkey Man – a review

Dev Patel, co-writer, director, star of this action movie

Right at the beginning of Monkey Man, at the top of the show, as media folk used to say, Dev Patel makes reference to John Wicks, Keanu Reeves commercial action man franchise. For the uninitiated, John Wicks is a repetitive killing machine, a super human who goes through a hundred killings in two hours in order to meet his chief adversary. The pornography of violence best describes the comic book plots. For the most part, Patel’s Monkey Man is John Wicks in Indian traditional costume.

This is a great pity for it reduces Patel’s first directed film, and co-written too, to a pastiche, derivative. His character, known only as Bobby, (the false name is all we get) is more human than android. There are more similarities to John Wicks, such as Bobby’s need to consult a mystical guru, who treats him as if Kung Fu’s Grasshopper, teaching him how to punch the stuffing out of a sack of beans hanging from the branch of a tree. Monkey Man is a revenge movie of few words, those spoken in short sentences.

In that spirit, there are countless action films that have the same functional, bare-bones plots, from the revenge sagas of the young, slim Steven Seagal before he became obese, forced to wear a toupee and long black coat to hide his corpulence, and muscles from Brussels, Jean-Claude van Damme, before his face became raddled by drug addiction. There are other intense action man movies also with the barest of plots, those from South Korea, The Man from Nowhere, and I Saw the Devil, or Indonesia’s The Raid and its sequel. Monkay Man trancends the genre. It has a different essence.

While it qualifies as a violent, physically volatile, kick ass and knife a few in the guts descent into man-made hell, action film, this one is a very different kind of brew. For a start it stars the director himself, the ridiculouly handsome and talented Dev Patel. That reason enough to see him for he has never given a bad performance in his career so far, though this story is his bid to be an Indian action hero.

It’s set in the squalid underbelly of Yatana, a fictional Indian city that looks a lot like Mumbai, but that offers up all the colour and crowds of that great metropolis. Patel keeps our gaze on the poor and the downtrodden so that he can compare their lives with the wealthy and the debauched. Patel, in his first outing as a filmmaker, wants to heighten our senses, but he’s also telling a story steeped in Indian mythology and urban grime.

Patel plays the monkey man of the title, the rubber monkey mask over his head and face as a boxer paid to take a fall in evry the third. The battering he takes each match gradually toughens him up enough to take revenge on a leading politician and the police chief Rana, played with a perpetual glower by Sikandar Kher, who murdered his mother, Neela, played by Adithi Kalkunte.

Patel indulges in a thousand flashbacks to help us see Bobby’s motivation for learning how to kill people, his deep affection for her and she for him. (Note: others with a traumatic childhood turn out to be priests or carers, but let that lie.) The quick pace of crash images and flashbacks are the devices Patel and his camerawoman Sharone Meir use to keep our attention on his journey. And in this regard, the cinematography and lighting are never less than superb.

Patel is not scared to flash his teeth, bare his flesh, and show his skinny legs

Patel creates a hero who is very much not an invincible John Wicks, but a flesh and blood fiery human who bleeds often and takes knife cuts and chokings. The action is staged in realistic settings with dingy lurid lighting and swirling camera work. There’s a touch of Scorsese’s Mean Streets is the violence.

The film is two hours long. Patel and his crew fill every minute. The look is quiet and foreboding, with a long deliberate build-up to the moment when he takes matters into his own hands. Patel wants to make his story realistic rather than Hollywood superficial. The film has three extended action sequences and just as you think it will fall into pulp fiction it rises above it.

There are weaknesses; the odd intrusion of a few riffs of pop music attached to the theme score at dramatic moments, and the non-completion of the character arc of Bobby’s little sidekick, a part Danny DeVito would have played if set in Los Angeles. The plethora of images are too many to remember when you leave the cinema. What you do remember are the original quiet moments; a dog he befriends to bring him a gun he needs to assassinate the police chief.

Monkey Man was originally backed by Netflix and would have been shown there, but after Jordan Peele bought the rights and came onboard as a producer, a theatrical release was engineered for it. The film is an 18, but with only suggestive sex scenes to titivate our palate for some sensuality. There is only one femme fatale and she does not develop her own storyline.

The acting is good ensemble work, the extras in their hundreds not something a Scots film could afford. Patel does one thing superlatively well, he exploits his star attraction. He creates an unlikely action hero skinny legged and morose, with an anger that simmers almost neurotically. When he finally explodes, it’s with a rage we only half saw coming.

Patel is on a personal odyssey of vengeance that involves fighting a larger corruption. To all that Patel adds another symbolic layer, derived from the epic Hindu poem “The Ramayan” and the deity named Hanuman. There’s too much to see, but it’s engrossing. Patel’s staging of, and acting in, the fight scenes. is random and spontaneous, with a razory intensity, culminating in the scene where he gently sticks a knife in his adversary’s throat and uses his teeth to shove the knife in to the hilt.

Three-and-a-half-stars. And there’s many a newbie director would give their right arm to create what Patels has managed, just sad his subject matter is so crashingly commercial. One day he will pare his images to memorable, beautiful longeurs and boost his dialogue to Satyajit Ray levels.

• Star rating: Three-and-a-half
• Cast: Dev Patel, Sharlto Coply, Pitobash, Vipin Sharma, Sikander Kher, Makarand Deshpande
• Directed by: Dev Patel
• Screenplay: Dev Patel, Paul Angunawela, John Collee
• Photography: Sharone Meir
• Music: Hauschka
• Time 2 hours
• Rating: 18
• RATING CRITERIA
• 5 plus: potential classic, innovative. 5: outstanding. 4: excellent. 3.5: excellent but flawed. 3: very good if formulaic. 2: straight to DVD or TV. 1: crap; why did they bother?