By Andrew Warren, Staff Writer
Who do you fight for? Why do you fight?
Audiences tolerate any act of violence in the name of revenge. Has your dog been killed? Well, feel free to murder every Russian gangster in the tri-state area. Was your unborn baby cut out of your stomach at your wedding? Just pick up a samurai sword and start cutting people up at a Japanese hotel. Did your friends leave you behind after you got mauled by a bear? Then just kill your friends… and the bear? I actually didn’t see that movie.
If Monkey Man had just been about a guy kicking ass in night clubs to avenge the death of his mother and the destruction of his childhood village, I would have been more than satisfied. However Dev Patel, the writer, director and star, doesn’t believe vengeance is righteous enough to fuel a mission, and this thoughtful approach to an old reliable genre leads him to interesting places.
In Monkey Man, Kid, played by Dev Patel, works every night wearing a monkey mask and kickboxing people triple the size of him. The promoter, played in the greasiest possible fashion by Sharlto Copley, tells him he’ll get paid more if he bleeds. What could possibly motivate someone to live like this? Well, when Kid was a child, his village was razed to the ground by Rana, a corrupt police chief, under the oversight of Baba Shakti, a religious figure with immense political power. Kid has spent his entire life training his body and spirit so that when the opportunity presents itself, he will be able to kill the men who changed his life forever.
As an actor, Dev Patel brings his A-game to the movie. Kid is not a hardened action hero in the vein of John McClaine or Jon Wick. He’s been made raw by the trauma in his past, as well as the current injustice he sees on the streets of India. Patel’s able to express so much emotion even when engaged in some pretty complicated fight choreography.
As a director, Dev Patel makes an impressive first impression. Patel’s first film, as an actor, was Slumdog Millionaire and it’s clear he was inspired by the director of that film, Danny Boyle. Both Slumdog Millionaire and Monkey Man portray the street life of India with a visual and sonic flair, Dutch angles and whip-pans underlaid by hip-hop tracks.
The action sequences are where Patel really shines as a director. The camera flies around with rapid speed but retains the choreography in its view. Every time a face gets punched, a neck gets slashed, a chest gets kicked, the camera moves with the blow, bringing the audience into the fight. There’s a sense of humor in the violence as well; in the improvised weapons and failed escape attempts. I would be shocked if I saw a better action movie this year.
The emotional beats are where Patel falls short. There are a lot of flashbacks in Monkey Man and most of them are quite lifeless. Patel overuses closeup photography that turns down the energy of the film. For a movie that feels so one-of-a-kind, these sequences feel as if they could have been directed by anybody. There’s no creative spark to them.
While the action is tremendous, the film overall suffers from story problems. Kid’s childhood is shown in eight or so different flashbacks that occur throughout the film as opposed to a 15 minute prologue. This decision comes with negative side effects. Firstly the film’s momentum is frequently disrupted. Second, the impact of Kid’s full childhood tragedy is diminished. By the fourth flashback, the audience has a general sense of what happened to him, and as a result, each successive flashback feels unnecessary.
The other significant story flaw with this movie is the apparent lack of an arc for Kid. Generally, in an action movie, I’m pretty forgiving if my protagonist doesn’t experience a nuanced transformation; however, Monkey Man dedicates a significant amount of time to explaining the arc Kid needs to go through, yet it didn’t feel like it actually happened.
Around 40 minutes of the film takes place in a religious temple. Kid is taught by the leaders who inform him how to take down the corruption of society. They stress that it’s not enough to act out of vengeance, but rather, he needs to be motivated by a constructive reason: he has to act on behalf of the other victims. Through the dialogue, it becomes clear that Kid has accepted this lesson, but at the same time, his actions haven’t really changed. He makes all the same decisions he would have made at the start of the movie. Therefore, the middle third of the film, the slowest of the three, feels pointless from a plot perspective.
I don’t want to end on a negative note. I really loved this movie. It’s so ambitious, not only from an entertainment standpoint, but from a social commentary standpoint as well. Nothing about this movie feels phoned in. The things this movie did well are enough to overlook the things it did poorly.
8/10