MONKEY MAN - Mark Reviews Movies

Monkey Man, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2024

Monkey Man is best viewed as a case that Dev Patel could be more than a fine actor. Given the chance, he could be a reasonable action star (The tuxedo here fits him well, too, if any casting agents involved in a particular British super-spy project are paying attention). The actor himself obviously suspects this is the case, so he makes his directorial feature debut with this simple and familiar but somehow undercooked tale of revenge. It goes out with a bang of an extended action sequence, to be sure, but the rest of it is so scant that Patel has to double-up on his double duties.

He plays an unnamed man referred to as Kid in the credits. The setting is modern-day India, where religion, politics, and real estate have entered into a terrible alliance that's forcing farmers from their land and ordinary folks out of their villages. As an actual kid, Kid was in such a town, which was forcibly, violently cleared by a police official named Rana (Sikandar Kher). Among the dead, we have to presume—albeit rightly—because the story builds up to the moment via flashbacks, is Kid's mother.

Obviously, Kid wants revenge against everyone and anyone who played a part in the violence, so he's in Mumbai, watching on television news as the scheming players have become more powerful and kept up their tactics. Conveniently, most of those powerful people are often centrally located in a fancy hotel, and after returning the manager's wallet (which he arranged to have stolen in the first place), he gets a job working in the hotel's kitchen.

Kid is also a fighter, by the way, taking falls in an underground ring for martial arts fighting, run by Tiger (Sharlto Copley) and probably incorporated into Paul Angunawela and John Collee's screenplay for two reasons. The first is so that we know Kid can fight, and the second is so that no one can reasonably complain that this revenge thriller is absent of much vengeance, many thrills, or any action of much significance for a while. A complete absence of action until it's absolutely necessary here might have been a wiser choice, especially since the Kid and his past remain foggy and not too interesting with the way this narrative ends up being structured here.

Basically, Kid sets out to kill the police official, named Rana (Sikandar Kher) and a regular visitor of the hotel's VIP lounge, and we follow him on the convoluted path to getting close to a man whose villainy—both generally and specifically toward Kid—isn't exactly clear. Oh, we know what this villain did, even without being told or shown it. Isn't being able to trust the audience's complete awareness of the plot without actually developing it a sign that, maybe, said plot might not be too compelling in the first place?

It's not here, despite some clever touches (Kid's kindness toward a stray dog, for example, has a payoff that has little to do with generosity) and a first-act complication that puts Kid's entire plan into jeopardy. Well, it would if these villains were as competent as the movie supposes they are, but Kid gets a second chance at his plan in the same locale and, admittedly, with a lot more resistance from anonymous henchmen. Still, it seems like a bit of an oversight for Rana and his fellow bad guys to continue to be so conveniently lined up for a frontal assault by someone with a grudge.

Such thinking, of course, is irrelevant in a movie like this, which needs the action-packed climax to function as easily as possible, considering how many neat and brutal moves Kid makes over the course of it. Before we get to it, though, the middle section amounts to a lengthy training montage and those flashbacks finally revealing why Kid is out for revenge in gruesome detail.

If the movie presumes we already know this information from the start, why does it bother delving into it so much? Far more intriguing are these villains and their land-grabbing scheme, especially since the apparent head of the cabal is a guru (played by Makrand Deshpande) who uses his religious influence to lead his followers toward a nationalist political party. The state of India's economic gap between the wealthy and impoverished, as well as how it's exploited in this political climate, amounts to thematic window dressing and not much else, though.

Patel's performance, both in terms of its physicality (which is impressive in those fight scenes) and its emotional vulnerability (He basically ruins his first attempt because he's devastated by his past and what he has decided to do), is a solid, grounding element for the movie. It almost doesn't matter that Kid is a mystery beyond his motive (once it's eventually and fully disclosed, of course), and it especially doesn't matter once the guy starts pummeling assorted cronies with his fists, feet, various weapons, and whatever's in reach (There's a wickedly ingenious moment when Kid's hands are indisposed, so he has to improvise a coup de grâce with a different part of his body).

In that sequence, Monkey Man knows what it wants to do and does it well. It's just a shame about the rest of the movie, really.

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