Go, Hanuman, Go!

‘Monkey Man’, the insanely pulpy directorial debut for actor Dev Patel, is a Hong Kong-style revenge flick that takes place in a fictional Indian metropolis. It’s also a savage indictment of class inequality and religious nationalism and a treatise on Hindu nationalism that features a phalanx of ass-kicking transgender priests. This movie is a lot, never quite as much fun or as profound as it wants to be, but when the kicks connect, they connect hard.

Patel is in nearly every scene, playing “Bobby” or “Kid,”  a youngish man who lives with unimaginable trauma and grief, drifting on the edge of society, earning a thin salary as a rubber monkey-masked cage fighter in an underground series run by a South African entrepreneur, played with delicious sleaziness by Sharlto Copley. But his real goal is getting revenge on the evil people who burned down his boyhood forest home and killed his beloved mother. Eventually he weasels his way into a staff job at a high-end bordello and coke den operated by his enemies. After an exciting but losing battle that includes a thrilling jitney chase through the streets, Bobby ends up in the care of a secret society of displaced transgender priests. They give him a magical tree drug that breaks him open and allows him to unlock the true hero inside himself, or something like that.

MONKEY MAN ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Dev Patel
Written by: Paul Angunawela, John Collee, Dev Patel
Starring: Dev Patel, Sharlto Copley, Pitobash
Running time: 121 mins

Monkey Man has a sidewinding plot, and Patel stages the action scenes with a lot of vigor, but it can’t always decide what kind of a film it wants to be. The cage-fighting scenes are fun and kind of gritty. The battles in the nightclub evoke, if not directly rip off, Park Chan-Wook’s ‘Old Boy.’ The flashbacks to his boyhood are gauzy, idealized, and kind of pretentious. And he mixes up the narrative with even more flashbacks, flash forwards, scenes from storybooks, monologues, and montages. Park Chan-Wook also mixes up narrative threads in his revenge thrillers, but does so to reveal key plot points. Patel mostly does so to highlight his big themes, which feels like an extra dollop of cream on top of an already rich meal. I understand straightforward narratives aren’t the vogue, but at some point maybe someone could have stepped in and told Patel “no.”

That said, Patel has embedded some very interesting ideas among some very entertaining John Wick-style action sequences. Bobby focuses most of his vengeance energy on the corrupt police chief who ravaged his boyhood, but the movie’s real villain is a creepy high-end yoga guru who is manipulating the masses through mind control and also enslaving them in a weird cylindrical factory. He is the chief advisor to a Nahendra Modi-style nonentity of a politician, and uses his yoga powers falsely to persuade the people that Muslims and the transgendered are the enemy.

Patel tries to layer this into an action picture, and it doesn’t all quite land, but Monkey Man at least attempts to retell the Ramayana in a modern setting with a protagonist who is part god Hanuman, part Rocky Balboa, and part The Bride from Kill Bill. It’s all very metaphorical and metaphysical, and it would have been nice if Patel could have provided us with more character moments and better dialogue, and maybe a bit more cheeky humor. I don’t know the names of the movie’s purported prostitute “love interest” or the chief transgender priest, or Sharlto Copley’s ring entrepreneur.

Patel is too busy showing us his tricks and influences than actually trying to craft a coherent narrative. There’s a version of Monkey Man out there that tells the story a little straighter, featuring cleaner lines and sharper writing. Instead, we have a wild, gritty kitchen-sink Hindu action picture for a Western audience.