Hanumania

MONKEY MAN

2024

Directed by Dev Patel

Written by Paul Angunawela, John Collee, and Dev Patel

Spoilers: moderate

I suspect that if you didn't look into it, you would perceive Monkey Man as something like a vanity project for its star, co-writer, co-producer, and first-time director, Dev Patel; and I could not in good conscience proclaim all vanity to be absent from a movie where its director has had himself take off his shirt, so he can exercise more effectively, and then had his women onlookers sigh and swoon at the sight.  Yet we should be fair: he's also put in the work necessary to be sighed and swooned at (he's most sinewy and taut), which is, happily, also largely true of his movie.

Even so, it looks vain, especially with Patel's highest-profile roles in the 2020s so far having been in boring movies for dorks; and hence it would be natural if Patel had wished to course-correct, with something a bit more full-blooded and action-packed and self-confident.  While the most significant experience he's ever had in an action movie that you'll have ever heard of was closer to start of his career, in the embarrassing live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender, I suppose he's at least had an action flick in his recent filmography that you would not have heard of, The Wedding Guest, though that would only modestly dissipate the sense of self-regard such as accrues to anybody in Patel's position co-writing, directing, and co-producing his own vehicle to prove his action hero—indeed, martial arts hero—bona fides.  Meanwhile, the movie that Patel co-wrote, directed, co-produced, and starred in is about a guy who rises from obscurity to become identified, metaphorically, if not altogether literally, as an avatar of one or more Hindu devas, a badass destined to destroy the combine of corruption, crime, and Hindu nationalism that's been veiled here only to the extent it is called by another name besides "the BJP."  I'm not sure "vanity" would quite cover that.  It would be like a Chuck Norris movie where he fought Janet Reno in mortal combat, and he directed it.

But, for I have every desire to be fair here, all it ever started as was the simplest doodle—a bareknuckle boxer in a monkey mask, a "monkey man," as it were (I don't know that the "Hanuman, the monkey-faced Hindu deity" thing had even occurred to him yet), simply an action-oriented figure that Patel, a taekwondo practitioner and reasonably big deal in competitive MMA as a juvenile, could play.  With a screenplay in hand hammered out between himself, Paul Angunawela, and John Collee, he had at least asked Neill Blomkamp to make it, yet as the story goes, his Chappie director told him he didn't feel like he was entirely up to being the white dude who made the movie that is, in its shortest description, "the one where transwomen train a martial artist to overthrow the Indian government."  Nevertheless, he saw no reason why the Gujarati-Briton ought not do it himself.  And so Patel did, although as that logline would almost necessarily imply, Monkey Man did not have the easiest time emerging into the light; as the years passed, its purchaser, Netflix, considered burying it altogether.  (To the best of my information, Monkey Man remains effectively banned in India, whose censorship board has refrained from bothering screening it at all; likewise, I expect there were some silver linings to Patel deciding that his film would actually be shot in Indonesia.)  It was rescued by Jordan Peele through his company—Monkeypaw, which is a little on the nose—and I'm grateful he did.

I've practically already summarized the film (shit, twice), but just so we're all on the same page, Monkey Man finds Patel portraying a man in Town, Northern India—wherever it is, when they're not speaking English they're dipping in and out of Hindi, though I kind of wish they'd been able to fully commit to one or the other—who's by now spent the majority of his life in the gutter.  He's credited as "Kid," but to the extent anyone calls him anything it's mostly "Bobby," a pseudonym adopted from the first product name he saw when asked who he was.  (If I have to call him something, it'll be the Kid, because English unlike Hindi has definite articles.)  We know, thanks to the kniving flashbacks and attacks of rage that sweep Patel's face, and the scars on his hands, that there is some defining event in his past, though all we're entirely sure of for a good long while is that something happened to his mother (Adithi Kalkunte), which had something to do with the police chief Rana Singh (Sikander Kher), and that on account of it the Kid makes it his mission to murder Singh, potentially upsetting the plans of the fascist movement to which he belongs, led by the cult leader, Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande).  (What these names, which both have religious significance, intend to signify is beyond my grasp, though I'm content with "Shakti" being plain-and-simply ironic.)  In the long meantime between his childhood and now, the Kid has made his living being a stubborn but lousy fighter in the bloodsport underworld run by Tiger (Sharlto Copley), but now he insinuates himself into a waiter gig at Queenie Kapoor's (Ashwini Kalsekar's) high-class club/brothel, where the elite meet to get sweet with trafficked women, and which is frequented by Singh.  But the Kid is not good at this: one botched vengeance killing later, and he's a grievously-injured fugitive.  He is taken in by a colony of hijras led by Alpha (Vipin Sharma), where he's healed, trained up, and sent back out with new purpose: finish the job, and destroy Shakti in the process.

Such generic stuff is generic for a reason, because it's rock solid, and as far as this screenplay goes I don't have one serious problem with it—the biggest is just the one you probably noticed, "a life lived in wrath is hollow and meaningless, you need a higher calling, so when you do take your vengeance upon your mother's slayer, can you do us a favor and kill his boss, too?", is not as grand an expansion of a hero's moral universe as the movie thinks it is.  (A very, very small problem, and I think this exhausts all Monkey Man's screenwriting problems, is that it sort of loses track of what exactly it wants to do with the Kid's "friend," small-fry sleazebag Alphonso (the mononymic Pitobash), who's not in any rigorous sense a friend, and more just a person inside the criminal organization to talk to, a function that Patel doesn't even seem that interested in addressing as either director or actor, so while he's not forgotten completely, he can only wind up an inserted-in observer to the events of the second half.)

Now, what you'll have heard about Monkey Man is that it's a "John Wick knock-off," and while they're explicitly an inspiration and exigence, I really don't agree, because outside of some lighting choices, maybe (because even this is probably overemphasizing what it's actually borrowing from the Wicks), it's taking its cues from an older, wider world of martial arts cinema, finding in this impoverished young man a font of vigorous folk heroism capable of remaking the world with his own fists and feet, and securing national redemption, so even if we don't bother considering the absence of the kind of arcane-ass lore that sustains the Wicks, simply as a matter of pure action construction, this one is completely disinterested in gun-fu, even when gunplay probably would be more logical.  The only time a firearm is truly important in a fight it's more like a maguffin, or rather a structuring element, than a weapon.

Honestly, it's leaning into its kung fu flick genericism as an active strength, fully aware that we understand this revenge movie because we've seen numerous other revenge movies, hence correctly guessing that it can withhold what the precise parameters of the Kid's tragedy are for over an hour of screentime, right up until it can drop the full story on us, not so much as a "reveal," but at the aptest moment for it to flatten us like a ton of bricks, with enough high-impact nastiness to the visual details that it still feels emotionally unexpected.  This is a special case of what Patel's doing throughout, in fact, which turns out to be hugely rewarding for the most part, which is good, since there's not a lot of martial arts in this martial arts movie (or at least less than the modern form of martial arts movie has trained us to expect), with no "real" fight and only one or two fights in the underground ring for half of its fairly generous 121 minute runtime.  In that interim Patel's primary goal seems to be to just soak you for as long as possible in incipient violence, as navigated by the Kid with single-minded intensity.

There's not much plot to fill time, either, and so story arrives more by way of the overriding mood and atmosphere we get, essentially a feeling of necrotic flesh that absolutely needs to be cut away.  Patel, who was born in Britain and never lived in India—whose parents, I understand, were born in Kenya and never lived in India—is extremely committed to a vision of India that, had his paler antecedents been more into corded wares in Europe than riding sick war chariots in western Siberia, would be obligatorily described as "exoticized," if not by much ruder words; but it is, whatever else, one impressively toxic vision.  It couldn't hurt that I find its more fundamental politics rousing, but while I wouldn't disbelieve you if you told me it was borrowing from any number of Indian noirs, this is some totalizing stuff that would be hard to deny the effect of no matter how you approached it, this utterly claustrophobic city that virtually exists solely at night—there are, like, two daylight exteriors regarding the city, one of which is an excuse for a montaged journey through a Rube Goldberged thievery ring, and the other of which is a fascist rally; all the other daylight exteriors are flashbacks to the Kid's childhood in the idyllic forest, and given the mythological dimensions of Hanuman, the Kid's henotheistic point of contact with the divine, the absence of any sunlight to aspire to is purposeful—and, as we shall discover alongside our hero, more-or-less literally every single business and social edifice turns out to just be the public facade of yet another labyrinthine underworld.  The chase that kicks off at the halfway point begins in Kapoor's brothel and, after ranging across town, ends up in another brothel, only a dirtier, cheaper one, which is all a little wild when you think about it.  There's the perpetual sense of a disease that's spread its tendrils through basically everything, connecting the lowest to the highest with tumorous filament, and a sheer squalidness that attaches to everything in even in the higher-class spaces thanks to cinematographer Sharone Meir's feature-length exercise in haze-choked neon and club lighting.

What all this winds up with is a remarkable debut for an actor-turned-director, in that Patel is clearly thinking of his film in terms of images and how those images fit together to create emotions, to the extent acting performance must've been the third or fourth priority—fourth at best, because world-building mood is first, and action choreography second, but even match-cutting must've taken third—in a movie that is, after all, nearly actor-proof anyway.  (Not that it's acted badly, but the only performances that make an impression—besides Patel's own, anyway, his lanky carriage and ability to look at things devoid of comprehension but without also coming off dim-witted, plus some really good angry face, turning out to be ideal for the Kid—are Sharma's, if for nothing else then on the basis of the novelty of a hijra mentor, and Deshpande's, who makes Shakti's quiet, gentle approach to villainy a fairly stomach-churning thing.)  It's not an across-the-board success as far as filmmaking is concerned: somewhat dovetailing with acting not being the chiefest concern for this actor, blocking only occasionally even exists as a true formal element (to the extent it does, it's the low-key expressionism of Patel standing there simmering away at his secret enemies while his secret enemies unaccountably fail to notice), and, perhaps relatedly, somebody needed to tell Patel there are, in fact, other close-ups besides "extreme."

But even the weaknesses here are, to a degree, mostly only failures of the strengths: you wanted claustrophobia, so of course here's a camera shoved right into Dev Patel's nose—and down the list of any complaints I'd make, "of course the cutting rhythms are little enervating and dislocating and designed to virtually never let you get comfortable," or "of course Meir is being obnoxious about shallow focus."  (Though it is another unfortunate data point on my "directors and cinematographers have literally forgotten how to do 'Scope ratio two-shots" list.)  But, on the other hand, the individual images can be great: our first look at the Kid in his "Monkey Man" guise entails the perfect movement of such a character into the frame, arguably offering more narrative information about our hero than every piece of dialogue in the first half combined, despite (or even because) Patel's face is being completely hidden behind a mask.  There's the opening of a crazed psychedelic sequence, cribbing from Haruman's most famous image (that one might more immediately wonder if it's a Temple of Doom riff), that Patel kind of just straight gives up on after the initial shock of it, and that's a Goddamn pity, but it's also wonderful that any of it managed to manifest in these circumstances at all, and the sensation of the spiritual bleeding into the physical is keenly-felt: it's a little annoying that the same "smash the camera directly into the actors' faces" language is used for two widely disparate purposes—urban hellhole claustrophobia and, in the flashbacks, maternal intimacy—but at the same time it does demonstrate that control of mood, and of all the various genre exercises that claim dubious descent from Terrence Malick, if Patel made such a claim, I'd nod, and tell him I definitely noticed.

Now, like I said, it's less of an action movie, quantitatively, than I think is likely to fully satisfy someone watching it for that reason alone—hell, I would've not ever expected it to be as simultaneously methodical and impressionistic as it is, even if I found that just about as valuable as simply having more martial arts—but it does make up for that with quality.  It's probably a slight bummer that the centerpiece assassination attempt and subsequent chase is the better of the two major sequences.  As the finale is a somewhat generic (now I mean it as a mild criticism) ascent through the various levels of a highrise, that first big action scene is going to be the one with the more complete sense of momentum, and it also winds up with the most variety—I would probably award it the title "best" simply thanks to its opening movement (um) in the bathroom, that is in fact gross in ways "bathroom fights" don't always get to be, and has the inordinate benefit of being built around a struggle for the Kid's gun that feeds it with dynamism and creativity.  Then again, I kind of adore the stark end-stage of the finale, too, even if it maybe scuttled my expectations for Shakti.

The choreography is strong stuff, though; for a germane Wick comparison, those films could be more beautiful and baroque in their consideration of human movement, but often too overly precious, and this, though still afforded excellent beat-by-beat storytelling and enormous filigree by Meir who, amongst other things, is getting some splendid graphic iconicism out of the act of people hitting each other, has a more atavistic vibe, and tends to feel more like people actually causing one another injury out of hatred and rage.  (You want to know the most John Wick thing about Monkey Man?  It pays for a song to pair with a fight in a club, and fucks it up, with mostly "realistic" sound mixing, rather than just letting the music dominate the soundscape.)  None of this is to suggest it cannot be inspired, though.  Suffice it to say that befitting a "monkey man," Patel's teeth are prominently featured in the choreography.  As that implies, Patel and his fight designer, Brahim Chab, have a delightful sense of humor, something that comes through just as much in the blunt denouement of the Kid's semi-professional fighting career, after his training has been complete.  (Which I am made to understand they stole from Ong Bak, but still.  Plus it winds up in a place of spectacle anyhow, because the fucking giant that they throw at him next, basically out of pure pique, is where I'd have surrendered to the movie even if I hadn't already: Patel's being serious here, and wants you to feel that seriousness in your bones, but he doesn't want to cheat you out of the fun you came to have, either.)

All told, even if it can be fairly obvious where Patel's inexperience got in his way, it's a pretty stunning work, and while it was not a hit (it only made its money back, rather than setting the world afire; I deeply regret that I was no help to it), I hope it earned enough goodwill to let Patel direct whatever he wants, because I'd love to see where he goes from here.  Even if it didn't, and Patel's directorial career only ever consists of just one film, I don't think that should blot out the achievement that career's made anyway, a movie that's exactly the one he wanted to make that's crystal clear about what pisses him off in this world, and is no slouch formally, either.

Score: 8/10