Worth: $18.00
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Cast:
Dev Patel, Sharlto Copley, Pitobash, Adithi Kalkunte, Sikandar Kher and Sobhita Dhulipala
Intro:
… exciting and distinctive.
Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man, interlaces many contradictory elements at once. Simultaneously tender and violent, familiar and fresh, it fuses the action films of Bruce Lee with the legend of Hindu monkey deity Hanuman, drawing from superhero epics, Bollywood musicals and political dramas. While the variety of Patel’s influences is overwhelming, what he creates from them is exciting and distinctive.
Set in the fictional Indian city of Yatana, the film follows Kid (Dev Patel), a quiet young man with mysteriously scarred hands, who wears a gorilla mask to fight in a dingy underground ring. Kid’s mother Neela (Adithi Kalkunte) was brutally murdered by a corrupt police officer, Rana (Sikandar Kher), one of a band of powerful players who rule over Yatana’s most marginalised citizens. Embittered by years of poverty and grief, Kid inveigles his way into a job at King’s (a pleasure palace for the upper-echelons) to hunt down Rana and avenge Neela’s death.
It’s clear from the film’s outset that there are definite glimmers of Batman in Monkey Man’s heroic DNA. Both carry the wounds of their family’s murder, brooding through shadowy alleys in an animal mask longing to rescue their city from evildoers.
Patel’s film vacillates between a plethora of styles and genres, but it is the action sequences that best showcase the first-time filmmaker’s great flair and enthusiasm. The film contains two magnificently jagged, rhythmic fight scenes. Partway through the second of these sequences, Kid pushes a knife into his opponent’s neck with his teeth, the blade seeping into his flesh as though it were made of playdough. Here, Kid’s fighting is unpolished but undeniably exhilarating, capturing all of his heart-wrenching determination. A slowed-down version of Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” echoes overhead, the scene shimmering with pink neon light and bloodlust. Throughout, Patel makes fantastic use of sound, mixing Indian tabla music, pop songs and jangling instrumentals.
Yet, for all its gore and vibrancy, Monkey Man is often melancholic and serious. In its indictment of the ruling class, the film condemns police corruption and violence against women in India. It is also steeped in Kid’s grief, recurrently showing mournful flashbacks of Neela guiding her son through the sun dappled jungle in long, handheld shots. In these moments, though, like the scene explaining the heavy-handed metaphor behind an escort’s (Sobhita Dhulipala) hummingbird tattoo, Patel unfortunately falls prey to cliché.
The film’s many disparate elements (its clichés included) are held together by the hero at its heart, deftly performed by an ever-charismatic Patel. In Monkey Man, he (again) proves himself an emotive, endlessly watchable leading man; and a promising talent behind the camera. Kid, too, is a superhero for the modern age; tough, sensitive and socially minded, he brings a much-needed dose of energy and originality to the world of action cinema.
