Review: 'Monkey Man' (2024)

Dev Patel's ambitious directorial debut isn't a new action classic, but it's good enough to justify intrigue and optimism for whatever he makes next.

Monkey Man (2024)
113 minutes
rated R (strong bloody violence throughout, language throughout, sexual content/nudity and drug use)
opening in theaters courtesy of Universal on April 5

At its core, Monkey Man is a 110-minute demo reel for its creator. Directed, co-produced, co-written, and starring Dev Patel, the intended-for-Netflix action drama (before it was “saved” from streaming purgatory by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions) often plays like a “look what I can do” calling card. The whole is less than the sum of its parts, but at least some of those parts offer an obvious talent (and can-do grit) alongside long-acknowledged (if undervalued for obvious reasons) matinee idol charisma. That it’s a better action vehicle than a political drama is an issue since it’s far more focused on the latter. Not unlike John Woo’s recent Silent Night, it becomes a slow-burn waiting game to get what we were promised in the elevator pitch. 

The picture opens with our protagonist (Patel, obviously) getting his ass bloodily kicked in an underground bare-knuckle brawl. Our monkey mask-wearing anti-hero is being paid not to win but to take excessive punishment for a cheering crowd. With little context, we see him finagle his way – via a clever pickpocketing montage –  into an entry-level job for madam Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar). Her brothel serves the political elite and the financially well-off.  As such, the job brings him into contact with a corrupt police chief (Sikandar Kher) who — as is revealed in all of the marketing — murdered his mother amid a politically motivated land grab.

However, an early assassination attempt spirals out of control, leading to a frenetic, extended action sequence. This scene is a highlight for sure, a claustrophobic, chaotic and frazzled escape scene where, for once, the whole “choppy and tight action” thing serves an artistic purpose. Spoiler: Our hero is as bad at the “take righteous revenge” thing as was Blake Lively in The Rhythm Section. Following a brush with capture, Patel’s unnamed protagonist finds himself in the company of a community of “hira” or transgender folks. Their leader correctly surmises that the police won’t search there due to discomfort with the population.

The second act offers an expected and frankly rote detour where our enraged revenger attempts to perfect himself physically and spiritually, with lip service paid to the notion of him fighting not just for himself but for a nation’s entire underclass. But it really is lip service, and honestly, the less familiar (to Westerners) locales, iconography, and imagery do much heavy lifting in terms of disguising what otherwise is a pretty paint-by-numbers grindhouse action thriller. We even get the hero befriending a stray dog and a random escort (Sobhita Dhulipala) to show that he’s A) better than his enemies and B) an underdog, no matter his ruthlessness.

That latter point is crucial. Patel’s would-be action hero is not a relentless, unstoppable one-man army, nor is he in a place of relative economic privilege prior to the inciting incident. He’s not a legendary hitman or an expert CIA black-ops agent who has to put his unique set of skills to work. He’s among the invisible class, helping to place this film within the realm of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. There’s also almost no gunplay in this picture, as Monkey Man’s action is closer in spirit to (offhand) the hack-and-slash horror of The Night Comes for Us or Cholcote than Taken, an early-2000s Tony Jaa fisticuffs epic or one of Ma Dong-seok’s “you just got hurricane punched into another zip code” Roundup movies.

Monkey Man’s politics are specific enough to be (allegedly) buried by Netflix out of fear of upsetting the ruling powers of a significant underexploited marketplace but generic enough for the unaware to understand “religiously-motivated right-wing government that shits on the poor = bad.” However, in a post-9/11 America, even that might prove politically divisive. Doubly so considering how the YouTube Troll Industrial Complex turns everything into an SEO-friendly culture war controversy.  That the film features Patel as a righteous avenger inspired by an existing Hindu god (Hanuman) to combat political corruption clothed in religious fervor is either mixed messaging or an attempt to reclaim certain spiritual iconography.

For a Western comparison, think Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation, which made Nat Turner’s slave rebellion explicitly motivated by Christian dogma, arguably the same Christianity that slaveholders used as a justification for keeping men in chains. However, the “monkey man” is presented here as a man with far more “because I choose to, dammit” agency and not one literally called into service by divine messaging. On that note, even if the color representing the evil political party changed from saffron to red (which, as in many countries outside of America, represents leftists), you’d have to be pretty dense to see the film’s onscreen depiction of its bad guys and think “dirty, godless liberals.”

If I didn’t know just enough about India’s politics/pop culture issues to get myself into trouble even trying to talk about it, I’d be half-convinced that the change was for Western audiences. Anyway, whether Patel’s actioner qualifies as transgressive, progressive, or politically courageous in 2024 either here or abroad, I’ll let others decide. I’ll merely note that corrupt politicians = bad didn’t use to be controversial. Moreover, we had a crowd-pleasing $152 million-grossing smash this past January featuring Jason Statham going full-revenge mode against “President Hillary Clinton,” whose son was A) the primary baddie and B) a cartoon version of Hunter Biden. Right or wrong, David Ayer’s The Beekeeper absolutely caused zero hands to be wrung. 

If the film takes too long to reach its goal (not unlike this review), its final reel delivers on the poster art. The finale is a banger, a long, fluid, endlessly stylish and relentlessly violent showdown as Patel’s protagonist wages war on the proverbial powers that be (or at least their hapless security guards). Look, if you came to watch Dev Patel looking sexy as fuck in a black suit as he dispatches righteous kills amid a techno-colored posh establishment, you’ll (eventually) get your money’s worth. That this personal passion play is merely a schlocky good time and not a new action classic only counts for so many demerits. 

Monkey Man should not be penalized for not being “the next John Wick” (which gets name-checked early on… Patel isn’t an idiot, folks). It works better as a style-over-substance genre riff and a visually pronounced demo reel for its director/star. That Patel was only able to make a movie like this 15 years after Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture is a testament to systemic racism. So, it’s ironic that it’s now being seen as a shining light in a pessimistic theatrical marketplace. Patel can’t singlehandedly save theaters from endless IP recycling any more than Monkey Man can save India. But there is entertainment value in watching him try. Whatever its issues, we can only hope that Dev Patel’s career as a behind-the-camera filmmaker has merely begun, as opposed to having already peaked, with this ambitious, heart-on-its-sleeve genre flick.