The Inescapable Promise of Monkey Man
All the messy highs of Dev Patel’s electric directorial debut.
Every few years, a trailer comes out that makes me really think, “Holy shit, let’s GO!”
The Social Network? Holy shit, let’s go! And holy shit, choral Radiohead? Absolutely.
Dune? Holy shit, let’s go! …To Arakkis. And Giedi Prime. And to all future destinations via Shai-Hulud!
The Creator? Holy shit, let’s go! …Back to the drawing board, maybe? It does look cool though. Ken Watanabe. Futuristic Thailand. Big AI. And also, this incredible scene featuring… Radiohead. Again. (Double holy shit!)
But no trailer (at least for a non-sequel (again, Shai-Hulud!)) has gotten me more hyped in recent memory than the one for Dev Patel’s directorial and screenwriting debut, Monkey Man. Or as The Big Picture’s Sean Fennessey so aptly put it:
I mean, again, just soak in at that glare.
Powerful stuff, tbh. What essentially looked like Slumdog Millionaire-meets-John Wick (including an important appearance from a cute dog, luckily this time with a seemingly less tragic fate), the Monkey Man trailer just hit that perfect spot where I felt like I got the entire tone, style, and idea of the story while also seeing an actor I really like (the aforementioned Dev Patel) do lots of cool stuff and mess guys up in ways I’ve never seen.
But a trailer does not a movie maketh, and while it’s easy to fall in love with a highly-stylized, expertly edited, and propulsive three-plus minutes of curated footage, the nearly two-hour film itself isn’t as easy to immediately connect with. Instead, it acts as the perfect trailer for Patel’s potential as a filmmaker moving forward.
Before we get into the specifics, let’s first look at how Monkey Man came to be.
To say that Dev Patel has had an odd career would be an understatement. He’s quite famous to different fans for different reasons. There’s the sect of millennials that know him from his run on the British teen show Skins and many more from his emergence as the lead in Slumdog Millionaire, both of which shot him into our collective consciousness in 2007/08. These were followed by The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, which were both hits; Hotel Mumbai, which was not; a big role on The Newsroom, which had one great scene that also happened to be the opener of the pilot; Chappie, directed by Neil Blomkamp, who has Patel’s original pick to direct Monkey Man; Lion (sure), and finally, the Wes Anderson-directed, Academy Award-winning short, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. And you know what? Patel fits perfectly into Anderson’s charming little world. He’s dapper, slightly goofy, and possesses just the right amount of precision.
Yet, if there’s one role in Patel’s career that hints at where he’d go with Monkey Man, it’s 2021’s retelling of an Arthurian legend, The Green Knight. Much like Monkey Man itself, this movie tackles mythology, blood lust, and the dark underside of the human spirit (mostly thanks to a truly unsettling performance by Barry Keoghan, something that can said about really any performance by Barry Keoghan), while also filming in 2019, not long after Patel had signed on to make Monkey Man at Netflix the year prior.
While it’s impossible to say, I like to think that Patel picked up a lot from The Green Knight director David Lowery while they were in production on the film in Ireland. Everything from making the most of a small budget and dissecting myths to contrasting fantastical montages with deeply intimate moments between characters. Hell, Patel’s Sir Gawain even befriends a fox, not unlike his character in Monkey Man and the previously mentioned pup. Again, HUGE year for movie dogs.
Once Monkey Man began production in 2020, however, it quickly stalled due to the pandemic. Eventually, Patel moved production to Indonesia and everything thereafter was super chill and easy. Just kidding, you can just tell by watching this movie that things were going wrong at every turn. For instance, Patel broke his hand on the first day of shooting a fight scene, which made things difficult as there are a lot of f*cking fight scenes in this movie!
Then once the film wrapped, Netflix decided to drop it after apparently seeing the movie and realizing that they hadn’t really purchased “John Wick in Mumbai,” but instead had a film that attempts to incorporate Indian mythology, the rise of Hindu nationalism, commentary on the caste system, and childhood trauma all behind the mask of a poor, broken man getting the absolute shit beaten out of him for the first two-thirds of the movie. Luckily, however, someone else saw the potential — both in Patel and the movie itself — and got it picked up by his preferred studio, Universal.
And that someone was Jordan Peele.
During the press tour for the movie, Patel has all but flatly said that Peele helped him find the movie in the edit, and there are rumors that the original cut clocked in closer to 150 minutes rather than the 113-minute version currently in theaters before Peele stepped in and helped rework the structure. That said, there are still parts of the movie where it’s easy to feel lost and a bit unsure of where we–both the audience and Patel’s character–are at.
Monkey Man seems like a simple premise at first: A boy named Kid (but also known as Bobby) loses his mother and then grows up to hunt down the people responsible for her death. A classic revenge story, easy enough. But when you add in all of the previously mentioned layers — Hanuman (the lord of monkeys), a Modi-esque figure running for Prime Minister, an at-times unsettling depiction of the lower castes in an all-but-the-name Mumbai — things get trickier, especially when you also add the subplot of the actual “Monkey Man,” a moniker Kid adopts in an underground fight ring hosted by an absolutely out-of-his-mind, Sharlto Copley.
There are endless flashbacks to a younger version of Kid growing up with his mom in the forests and countryside out of the city. There are cutaways to scenes from the story of Hanuman and how the protagonist feels they’re running in parallel with the obstacles, failures, and trimuphs in his own life. Again, there’s also Patel hanging out with a cute puppy that ends up helping him sneak a gun into the club where he gets a job to finally hunt down the man who killed his mother. This doesn’t go well (to say the least) and Kid ends up seriously injured before being rescued by Alpha, a transgender woman and hijra community leader who takes him to safety.
From here, we watch our hero rebuild his strength, learn the power of community, trip on some tree bark to find the true Monkey Man within, and get absolutely shredded. While the scenes of him sparring shirtless with a giant bag of rice might seem a bit gratuitous, I did find myself thinking, “If I looked like Dev Patel and was directing a movie where I starred as a deadly street fighter, I too would make myself look as awesome as possible for as long as I wanted.”
While the Rocky-inspired scene has its silly moments, it also contains one of the most riveting sequences in a film I’ve seen all year. In what isn’t exactly a cameo, but is just more of a flex by Patel, he cast Zakir Hussain — one-time collaborator with the great Ravi Shankar and arguably the best tabla player of all time — to play the tabla in several scenes, but specifically in the training montage where Hussain spurs on the intensity of Patel’s sparring as the recovering Monkey Man attempts to follow the beat of Hussain’s incredible tabla playing. It’s one of those scenes that I’m sure even Jordan Peele thought, “No way am I touching this,” when they were working on the final edit.
While the movie has some good moments earlier on — the beautifully choreographed con job to steal the club owner’s purse, which changes hands between 10+ people in the slums of this imaginary Indian city specifically, comes to mind — it’s this training montage that gets you to start thinking, “Dev Patel might actually be a good director one day.” Oh, and the first major in-the-club fight sequence that climaxes with Patel smashing an enormous fish tank, which is always awesome, before attempting to escape Bourne Identity-style by jumping through a window and failing to break the glass with his full body weight, which is always funny.
These scenes in themselves show some promise and potential. However, it’s the last 20 or so minutes that should require a seat belt and maybe a neck brace.
As a protagonist is want to do in the final act of a fight ’em up action movie — and yes, there are some guns in Monkey Man, but the film relies primarily on a much more intimate, hand-to-hand style of fighting than John Wick’s gun-fu (they even make a John Wick reference in the movie when Kid goes shopping for a gun) — he must find his enemies and make them pay. And holy shit, does he ever.
Similar to sequences from The Raid, Old Boy, and even some classic Craig-era Bond movies, we watch Patel’s character make his way through increasing levels of the club he formerly worked at, moving from the entrance into the kitchen, up the elevator to the dining room, and eventually having his two most climactic battles in the VIP room and penthouse. We watch him continue to rise — both in terms of Kid’s intensity and the floors of the building where the fights take place — endlessly maiming, nearly killing, and absolutely ejecting a series of lackeys off this mortal coil as Kid shows that he has fully transformed. While he begins his story as a wiry street urchin who can take a punch and dish it out when needed, by this point, Kid has evolved into a non-stop murder machine who requires nothing more than a knife, a serving platter, or a smashed bottle of oil and a gas burner to inflict as much pain as possible.
But even though there is a lot of murdering going down, you never feel lost in the chaos. While earlier parts of the movie centered on flashbacks and cutaways to other ages or states of mind can feel obstructive and at times distracting, the action of the final storming of the club is clear, concise, and paced to feel like you’re riding on top of a freight train (or maybe even Shai-Hulud itself).
It’s also at this point in Monkey Man when we start to see Patel fully utilizing his cinematographer Sharone Meir to capture some incredible images to help cement the story of what’s happened to this innocent boy-turned-adult WMD in human form. While Meir’s resume is checkered, to say the least, there is one movie that stands out as a direct precursor to his work on Monkey Man and a clear influence on some of the film’s styling: 2014’s Whiplash. Much like the intense band performance scenes he shot for Damien Chazelle in his first major motion picture (don’t @ me, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench people), you can feel Meir helping Patel capture the chaos of the scene without ever losing the focus and important details through the constant movement through the rooms of the multi-floor club.
But it’s these three shots that tell you everything you need to know about this movie.
In terms of shots not featuring Patel himself, this is second to none. These are members of the hijra community that saved Kid for the first time after he was mortally wounded and were then responsible for much of the hootin’ and hollerin’ during his shirtless training montage. They also apparently got really good at kicking ass at some point — which allowed them to save his ass for a second time in the club — and adopted these green Hanuman masks as part of their disguise for other events occurring during the club raid. But honestly, who cares why? They look sick as hell.
As for the others…
My guy
is cooking.
By the time we get to the last, beautifully shot scene, you start to think, “Why couldn’t this have been the movie? Did we really need everything else?” Remember, no one saw John Wick and thought, “Boy, I wish I had more back story.” (Well, someone did, but that’s neither here nor there.) But it’s the previous 70 or 80 minutes that act in such effective contrast to this final sequence.
While we experience every color of the rainbow traversing through not-Mumbai Mumbai, during the club assault, it’s black, neon, and the jarring masks of another realm. Everything can be heightened because we know the stakes at this point, and we understand that, for better or worse, both our lead character and director will not stop until they reach their goal of inflicting as much beautifully orchestrated carnage as possible before our very eyes. We’ve watched as an orphan rose through a harsh world to become the most fearsome assassin in an entire megalopolis, all while a well-known actor progressed through his first film to go from a guy with some ideas and determination to someone who’s going to 100% get a chance to do this again. And if that isn’t the goal of a directorial debut — other than giving us a few glances on screen of the stunning and impossible — then I don’t know what is.
At one point in Monkey Man, the penultimate bad guy tells his top henchman to find Patel’s character, who said-henchman refers to as “a nobody, some kid from the gutter.” The quasi-religious figure and advisor to not-Modi Modi responds with, “I used to be a nobody too. Find the nobody before he becomes a somebody.” While he might not be there quite yet, it’s safe to say that Dev Patel — as both a writer and filmmaker — is quickly on his way to becoming somebody. And if Monkey Man is serving as the trailer for where his career heads, I can’t wait for the feature presentation.
