“Monkey Man,” the directorial debut of Dev Patel, is a sharply dressed and fairly well-spoken film. It doesn’t pull punches when showing action, often reveling in the blood and viscera that lie in the wake of its protagonist.
Even with a somewhat paint-by-numbers plot, it is clear that Patel has a directorial voice, and he uses that voice to speak sincerely, the best you can ask for from a first-time director.
The film follows Kid, a young boy who harbors anger at the world and the people at the top of it. After being robbed of his ancestral land and watching his mother killed in front of him, he is forced to make ends meet in an underground fighting club. Soon he finds a way to strike those who have wronged him, and he wastes no time beginning his path of carnage.
What really steals the show is the visceral action and camera work on display. Fights in the film often feel like real knock-down, drag-out brawls, which illustrates the ferocity of Patel’s character well.
Even where words are absent, the action is always there to pick up the slack, giving insight to the character and spectacle to the setpieces.
Adding further depth to the action are the allusions to Hindu mythology. Many times throughout the film comparisons are made between Kid and Hanuman. Hanuman is a deity who — thinking it was a piece of delicious fruit — tried to reach for the sun and eat it, and was promptly punished by the gods.
These allusions come in many forms, including when Kid’s mother directly calls him Hanuman, but they are most well utilized in the first major action set piece of the film. In the film, Kid is consumed by a need for revenge and when he’s given the chance to get it he jumps for it.
He ascends to the VIP Lounge — Heaven/sun —finds his mother’s killer and tries to kill him but is promptly beaten bloody and nearly killed.
There is little room for complexity in the writing of the villains, they are, for all intents and purposes, monsters who care little for human life. They gleefully step on the weak under the guise of religious piety and social betterment.
This can leave the villains feeling like easily the weakest piece of the film, they truly do feel like they exist solely to be brutalized in a satisfying fashion. However, even if they lack depth they do have a tangible effect on the narrative and we get to see the extent of how they affect society.
They routinely afflict mockery and often worse onto the LGBTQ+ community, the disabled, and people who happen to live on land that they want. This makes it all the more satisfying when those groups ultimately play a role in their undoing.
“Monkey Man,” much like the kid in your third grade class who was raised by his grandparents, speaks with a level of understanding beyond its years. which makes the veers into more simplistic writing choices a tad jarring, but otherwise excusable.
