‘Monkey Man’ movie review: Dev Patel’s debut has bloody grit but lacks action understanding
Actor Dev Patel has delivered his directorial debut in the shape of the action thriller Monkey Man, in which he also stars and co-wrote with Paul Angunawela and John Collee. Patel plays the lead role of the Kid, a young fight club brawler who sets out on a mission of revenge to track down the corrupt political and religious leaders who enacted the death of his mother during his childhood.
Patel delivers a gritty and guttural debut that dives headfirst into trauma, anger, Hindu mythology, religion, and fairytale. It’s evident that the Slumdog Millionaire and The Green Knight actor has a deep passion for the action genre with his film’s frantic and bloody fight scenes, and he manages to pay his respect to the John Wick franchise in a moment of tongue-in-cheek humour, too.
However, Patel seems to think that such action sequences – nay, mostly any sequence – ought to rely primarily on close-up shots that detail all the blood, sweat and tears of their combatants and characters. This close-up obsession, though, leads to a viewing experience that borders on migraine-inducing, and one can rarely tell what’s really going on during fights that often appear blurry and lack a desirable crisp aesthetic.
These moments are indeed visceral and exciting, but without the establishing, mid-range and long shots to give exposition and variance to the impressive choreography, the experience actually ends up being rather bewildering. A shot in which the protagonist fights on a bar top with a further-out zoom than usual served as a welcome reminder of the absence of proper editing, shooting and production knowledge. In that light, Patel certainly has some work to do in learning how to stitch together the genre he so clearly admires.
There are issues with plot structure, too, which tends to feel rather messy and disjointed. The reason for our hero’s revenge quest is merely alluded to through the movie’s first half before a lengthier, almost hallucinatory, flashback sequence explains all. However, this leads us to question Monkey Man’s motives for most of the important narrative-establishing moments of the film; by the time they are properly revealed, we’ve been whacked around and disoriented in our seats so much that we don’t really care for the reasoning or the explanation.
There’s an admirable juggling of narrative strands, though, with both historically and contemporarily important issues being given deserving attention. From state-sanctioned violence and corruption to manipulative and power-mad religious land-grabbing, from the oppression of transgender warriors to the forced sexual labour of young women, all of which lead to one outcome in the eyes of the Kid: bloody and unabating revenge, which comes in unrelenting zealous blasts.
While Patel’s ultimate missteps as a director and writer are evident, he does manage to make up for them with yet further proof of his brilliance as an actor, as capable in moments of sympathy and emotive yearning as in hard-hitting action sequences. In that light, Monkey Man might have been better left to a more collaborative team, though it certainly endured production hell.
Still, it’s enjoyable, slightly painstaking viewing, even if it tends to want to be John Wick just a little too much without having the patience to actually understand why Stahelski and Reeves’ beloved action series works as well as it does.
Check out the trailer for Monkey Man below.
