Monkey Man

Or: … And Some Go To Therapy

Written, directed, and staring in his new feature, Dev Patel has not come a long way. This is not a snub on him (as a writer, director, or actor) but a notation that Patel has a kind of story he’s drawn to since the beginning of his career which is good hearted young man, kind of at sea with himself trying do good in a world that actively wants him erased. It’s a part he performs very well indeed, and it’s nice to see the actor taking the creative reigns.

Monkey Man, Patel’s punch-em-up is a classic revenge tragedy. A nameless young man seeks vengeance for his mother (Adithi Kalkunte), slaughtered in a cleansing of a village for reasons both religious and corrupt. His sole aim in life is to move close enough to Rana Sighn (Sikander Kher) and Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), the tag team of Police Chief and Holy Man who promise to lead the city and India at large into an age of vice and cruelty. To do this, he slowly climbs through the ranks of the club/brothel (be warned, dear reader, the brothel bits are not left to the imagination) both his unwitting adversaries frequent, while making ends meet by serving as a heel in an underground bareknuckle boxing ring.

It’s a story we’ve seen before, with varying levels of gore and torment. With our hero tied closely to the monkey god Hanuman there are strong homages to the Ramayana, (there’s a trapped working girl named Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala) and Kher is serving a Ravana-esque energy), though there are plenty of grace notes Patel’s personal mythology too (an extended sequence of a stolen purse making its way through a city slum, a lost youngster named Lion).

As a writer Patel makes clever subversions of what me might expect (our hero weaponizing his Pet The Dog moment). As a cinematographer Patel creates beautiful, almost impressionistic fights: combatants caught in mirrors, swooping camera work, and many an improvised weapon employed in death and dismemberment (particularly memorable is fatal combination of knife and teeth), and you can chart how Patel’s character becomes better at combat throughout the film, believably graduating from scrappy brawler to elegant dissembler of limbs. The problem is the movie is unequally weighted in its story. Everything is funnel towards towards one, inescapable conclusion, though there are some room for surprises.

The best of these is when our hero is drawn into a community of Hijra, the third-gender trans folk whose communities have existed in India since time immemorial, though they have come under increased persecution in the present day. Their leader (Vipin Sharma) provides our hero with the Yoda-ing that he may fulfill his destiny, and the community leavens the grim tone of the film with laughter and fellowship and thirsty trans-folks giggling over a shirtless, and turning up to fight baddies in gorgeous gowns. Seeing Dev Patel and the regional reps of the Alphabet Mafia beat the snot out of gangsters is well worth the price of admission.

I can’t say that Monkey Man is the clearest form of the story Dev Patel has been trying for all his life to tell, but if you want to see blood be signed down upon the wicked and a reminder to give thanks to the mothers in your life, whoever they may be, it is certainly not a waste.