A great thing about action movies as opposed to some of the other genres I get excited about is that they often have a chance to sneak up on me. I had no inkling of a movie called MONKEY MAN coming until the trailer dropped just a couple of months ago. And then all the sudden that morning I knew that the actor Dev Patel (THE LAST AIRBENDER, THE GREEN KNIGHT) had practiced Taekwondo since he was ten years old, had competed in national and international competitions, and grew into a passionate fan of international action cinema, so now he was not only starring in a violent martial arts revenge movie set in India, but also making it his directorial debut. And I read that Netflix produced it but Jordan Peele saw it and convinced them to sell it to Universal so it could play theaters. (Later we learned that Netflix was trying to get rid of it because it kinda seemed like it was criticizing the current right wing regime in India and might complicate their business dealings. Embarrassing for them, good for us.)
There was some grumbling among my friends in action movie Twitter ‘cause when Borys Kit tweeted out that first story he short-handed MONKEY MAN as “John Wick in Mumbai.” They said well actually JOHN WICK didn’t invent that stuff, these movies take inspiration from the cinema of South Korea, Hong Kong, India, etc. I thought yeah, okay, but you knew what he meant. Funny thing is, it turns out MONKEY MAN explicitly references JOHN WICK, thanks Chad Stahelski on the credits, was going to use the same action team until the pandemic changed their plans, and shines brightest when showcasing Patel’s lanky, Keanu-like limbs draped in a nice suit, battering through staff and patrons of an elite establishment. There’s even an important dog character!
It’s not like JOHN WICK in any derivative ways, but it’s exciting in a similar way. Like JOHN WICK, MONKEY MAN has a well known actor – this time with little previous association with the action genre – suddenly stepping out of the shadows having already done the work to make a stylish, viscerally entertaining banger, based in classical tropes but establishing its own voice, setting up despicable bad guys and knocking them down, thankfully with more fists (and knives, and broken bottles) than guns. The comparison is not unreasonable! I say take the compliment.
A major story difference is that rather than being a legend in the underworld, Patel’s character is a nameless nobody. I mean really, we don’t even know his name, we know he’s making it up when he calls himself “Bobby.” (The credits call him “Kid.”) We get the idea that someone killed his mother (Adithi Kalkunte, HOTEL MUMBAI) in front of him when he was a kid, and more will be filled in about that later. But he seems to have already spent years preparing for his revenge, which begins by having people steal the wallet of Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar, BABLI BOUNCER), the manager of a fancy hotel-like brothel called Kings, so that he can return it to her and talk her into giving him an entry level job. From there he works his way up by working hard and getting on the good side of one of his bosses, Alphonso (Pitobash, SHOR IN THE CITY) with an insider gambling tip.
See, I didn’t mention that “Bobby” also participates in brutal underground fights at a place called Tiger’s Temple, Tiger being the owner and emcee, played by Sharlto Copley (DISTRICT 9, THE A-TEAM, Spike Lee’s OLDBOY). Bobby is the fighter in the monkey mask. We see that he can fight and take punishment, but isn’t necessarily the top guy. When he tells Alphonso to bet on the monkey winning two rounds and going down in the third we can see that he can handle himself and also is willing to do anything to achieve his objectives.
It’s a great structure because we realize okay, he’s got this plan, and he’s building to the point where he can set it in motion, but then way too early for it to be over he finds his window when he can be alone in the restroom with Rana Sing (Sikandar Kher, Sense8), who acts like a gangster but is the chief of police. So Bobby takes his shot but it goes spectacularly wrong, he gets beat up and chased across town. He didn’t get him, he blew his cover, and later he gets shot by police.
Okay, so we were on this trajectory, then we got knocked off, what now? How about one of my favorite action tropes: he falls into a lake, wakes up in a temple where he’s being nursed back to health, and ends up training and learning how to try again with a whole new mentality. Cinema. An original new wrinkle for this version is that his savior Alpha (Vipin Sharma, GANGS OF WASSEYPUR) and the others in the temple are members of the hijra community – trans women, considered a third gender.
It’s very much an underdog story, and not just in the usual “the odds are against him” action movie sense. Also not just in the sense that he feeds rich people food to a stray alley dog. The income inequality in the fictional city of Yatana is always present – during a car chase, for example, we see children sleeping on the street. The villains are exploiters living opulent lives. Rana works for a supposedly righteous guru called Baba Shakti (Makrand Deshpande, JUNGLEE, RRR), and in fact killed Bobby’s mother while clearing out their forest village to build the compound Baba still operates from. Baba also leads an oppressive political movement who are trying to force the hijra out of the temple, and who have a nationalist candidate set to win the big election on Diwali.
So Bobby and his new friends have to help and learn from each other, and he has to expand from his single-minded revenge mission to a larger cause, in order to succeed. And since this is an action movie, part of that includes building a new fighting style. You know I’m a sucker for novel training methods, so I believe my favorite thing in the whole movie is the bit where a tabla master makes sounds with his drums to tell him what kind of hits to do on his punching bag, and to establish a rhythm for him to follow. I didn’t even know it was Zakir Hussain, who has played with George Harrison, Van Morrison and Earth, Wind & Fire, and on the scores for APOCALYPSE NOW and LITTLE BUDDHA. I know him from Bill Laswell’s project Tabla Beat Science. (I swear I had that around here somewhere, but I can’t find it.)
The action is fast, brutal, and varied. I like a movie that gives us fights in a dingy ring, on the streets, in a kitchen, in a bathroom, and everywhere else. Often Patel and d.p. Sharone Meir (THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT [2009], WHIPLASH, SILENT NIGHT) put the camera right in the middle of the battle in a way that’s not usually my preference, but I think it’s mostly very effective here. The choreographer is Brahim Chab, whose stunt career spans everything from DTV classics to Indian cinema to the Jackie Chan stunt team. He’s doubled Scott Adkins and played fighters in MAN OF TAI CHI, NEVER BACK DOWN: NO SURRENDER and BOYKA: UNDISPUTED, among many others. I wasn’t familiar with him, but this week’s Action For Everyone has a really good talk with him.
I think the action pay offs are more than sufficient, but to me it’s all the little details of the story and storytelling that make it really sing. Like I like that Alphonso is a funny character we come to enjoy the company of but aren’t asked to love. He’s a guy who Bobby needs for his purposes, he provides a supercharged tuk-tuk named after Nicki Minaj for some somewhat comical chase scenes, and he begins to respect Bobby when he sees him fight. But he’s also an asshole who’s part of this scumbag operation, only helping because he’s been tricked, and the movie never asks us to pretend all is forgiven, nor does it make him turn villainous when the truth gets out. He finally gets a full picture of this Monkey Man and his revenge, gives a serious “holy shit” look, and the rest is left to our imagination.
The escort Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala, The Night Manager) is a smaller character but I also really appreciate the economy of her arc. She’s the only other one who really acknowledges Bobby at Kings, noticing how much it bothers him to see how Rana treats her, though she doesn’t know the reason. It’s meaningful for her to approach him and acknowledge this but she basically tells him to toughen up, he can’t do this job if that kind of stuff is gonna bother him. It seems like realistic advice but when the shit goes down and Sita takes the opportunity to whack Queenie over the head we know she’s ready for a new reality.
I also love the motif of bleach. Initially it represents having to do dirty jobs. When Bobby begs Queenie for a job he shows her his burnt hand, claiming it’s from bleach, to show what a hard and humble worker he is. He takes his alias from the brand of powdered bleach he uses to clean the kitchen and bathrooms, and that he later cuts Rana’s cocaine with. And when he’s symbolically reborn before his final attack he takes the monkey mask and dunks it in bleach. I think it’s a Hindu reference, but maybe it’s to disinfect it, or transform it, make it new. I don’t know exactly, but it’s cool.
I wondered if there might be some nods to Patel’s previous roles. He delivers chai to Queenie, which was his job in SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. He gave the big showy role to Sharlto Copley, who he co-starred with in CHAPPIE. I’m pro-CHAPPIE and pro-Sharlto Copley showing up playing weirdos in all kinds of movies, so I admire that. There’s a scene with a little boy named Lion – is that a reference to his movie LION, where he was the grown up version of a street kid like that? I think it might be. That’s cute.
The other lion reference in the movie is a negative one. We see fawning media profiles of Baba, and they call him “the Lion of India,” talking about him coming from poverty, being this righteous, natural, spiritual being. But when the real guy is out in the world the camera follows the shiny lion hood ornament of his luxury vehicle, ‘cause the Lion of India is just another super-rich asshole lording over everybody.
There’s so much attention to detail in this movie, everything seems very purposeful. I mentioned to my friend Wil how the early fights are shot pretty closeup without establishing the geography as much as I like, and I was glad they let go of that style for the finale. He said he thought that was intentional, and I thought duh, I’m sure he’s right. Bobby has to fail, start over, and come back with a different view of his purpose, so the action is still fast and visceral but there’s much more clarity to it. And that’s why he succeeds this time. It’s beautiful.
Patel is credited as co-writer of the script along with Paul Angunawela and John Collee. The latter wrote MASTER AND COMMANDER, HAPPY FEET and HOTEL MUMBAI, which must be how Patel knows him (just like much of the cast).
Man, look at this thing. An international co-production, influenced by all the great modern action movies, combining revenge, crime, and underground fighting, done with great style and production value, culturally specific but thematically universal, plus it’s got a little weirdness and shades of grey for added spice. Yeah, of course I loved this!
I think this is a special action movie, I hope it’s not the last one we get from Patel. I can’t wait to see what he does next, or to find out who’s the next Dev Patel out there ready to give us their “MONKEY MAN in _______.”
p.s. The former Birth.Movies.Death writer Siddhant Adlakha did a piece for Time called “Monkey Man’s Political Critique Misses the Point” that’s worth reading. I believe he’s lived in the U.S. most of his life but he grew up in Mumbai and has an understanding of Indian politics that most of us here don’t. Though he’s overall semi-positive about the movie he points out that it sidesteps the central issue of mistreatment/displacement of Muslims, and writes that its mixture of Hindu imagery and violence is too similar to the growing nationalist movement it means to criticize. It’s an interesting and compelling argument, though I think that the movie being made in English suggests that speaking to the current situation in India is not Patel’s primary goal.
update: Siddhant contacted me and very politely mentioned that “I’m not sure how monkey man being in English precludes it from speaking on Indian politics, since English is one of India’s official languages and English language films release there all the time!” So please forgive my ignorant last sentence and check out his piece.
April 12th, 2024 at 3:08 pm
Grrrr… Attempted to see this Monday, but it’s not playing at the non-chain, non-annoying theater. And AMC (true to form) canceled the showtime I was going to attend.
I was under the impression they were giving this a real release. But it seems in actuality it’s more of a performative release before it’s on streaming probably next week. These releases are rough for us who work weekends.