Monkey Man review: Crunching action elevates Dev Patel’s directorial debut

Chawls, therefore, turn into concussed sites for brawls, the ruins of an old home a place for refuge. At one point, a police helicopter chases down and speeding auto-rickshaw down a busy road. Between the virtues of its steady politics and the progressivism of its action set-pieces, Monkey Man is stylish, politically sharp and thrilling, without necessarily being memorable.

Patel plays a chef operating out of the chaotic kitchen of a shady hotel in Mumbai. He moonlights as a fighter at an underground club. Here, he wears a monkey mask, as a sort of homage to stories about lord Hanuman that have been passed down from his late mother. The shadow of religious extremism hangs over the film’s world, with deities, appropriated left, right and centre.

The villains are marked in bold — a corrupt police officer, played by the excellent Sikandar Kher, and Makarand Deshpande as the scheming, yoga-practising godman, who operates from his secretive ivory tower. Patel’s unnamed character scrapes through adolescence, pining for the blood of the two men he considers directly responsible for the death of his mother. It’s a slingshot journey, punctuated by some glass-shattering, bareknuckle action that can at times become a bit too violent.

A faultless, underdog actioner

What obviously works for this straightforward underdog actioner is its milieu and the clenched nature of the landscape it is set in. The streets look dank, ungainly but brimming with character. A fight sequence that moseys through a brothel is breathless and scandalous at the same time. That dual high of sex — so ironically repressed as a cultural trope in our cinema — plays alongside the gutting violence of men going at each other with hammers and knives. Not with guns and armoured suits, mind you, but with knuckles, fists and pointy sharp things. Far removed from the ludicrous ornamentation of desi action films.

Patel has spoken in interviews about how he broke his hand on the first day of the shoot, and you can only really wonder how the rest of him has survived unscathed. This is gonzo, East-Asian Martial action (Indonesian The Raid comes to mind) done to thrilling, at times toe-curling effect. A bathroom-set brawl escalates to the kind of body horror that feels like it has been plumbed from other genres altogether.

The action is faultless, its ability to mime and elevate the local setting, admirable. A chase is, therefore, performed in an auto-rickshaw, a street dog is coached into becoming an accomplice and those living on the margins of society transcend the hollowness of the core. Patel’s character is revived by a group of eunuchs, his life saved endlessly by either sheer luck or ‘divine’ intervention. Through the woods of piety and misbelief there is ultimately clearing a patch of time-space where justice becomes a synonym for faith. It’s why violence feels like a natural recourse. The film starts with a mother telling her son the story of a just, all-powerful god, only for him to grow up and enact his will.

A tale of bloody, breathless revenge

Monkey Man is at its finest when it is proportioning gorgeously lit alleys and blood-letting maniacs compared to the emotional strings it tries to tie along the way. Sobhita Dhulipala is decent, Vipin Sharma notable, but neither yields to a moving emotional connection. Thankfully though, Patel’s direction rises above the colonial idea of the Indian street as a place for multicultural woe and chaos. There is suddenly this design in place, a structure in sight and through it Patel, his wiry, ripped figure punches more so in reactive frustration than touristy attitude.

The only bit where Monkey Man, for all of its stylistic tributes and spectacular visuals, falters is its inability to actually root all that violence and murder in something emotionally wretched and moving. There are throwbacks to the mother-son relationship that started it all but frankly, moments when the protagonist spends time with a hungry dog (another John Wick hangover) show his desperation to not just punch right but as a matter of civilian courtesy also ‘live right’.

Monkey Man obviously hasn't been released in India yet. Even if it were to, it’s impossible to visualise it as anything but circumcised or butchered. This sort of violence, nudity and political severity, simply isn’t welcome at a time when only a certain ilk of patriotic films queue up at screens, to ultimately return with their tails between their legs.

You could argue that Monkey Man has an audience, at least in Indian multiplexes, but the ones seeking it know that the chances of watching its full-tilt spray of blood and mayhem is unlikely to happen without a few aggrieved cuts and splices. For those stakes alone, it’s a worthwhile portrayal of bloody, breathless revenge.