Dev Patel’s Monkey Man is all over the place. It’s also from all over the place. The film is a tribute to Hindu deity Hanuman, references the Ramayan (Sobhita Dhulipala is called Sita in the film), employs Patel’s Western lens to see Yatana – a seemingly fictitious version of Mumbai. It features both gully and gangsta rap, and doffs its hat to the John Wick and The Raid franchises for its action choreography and gunfights. The film switches between English and the odd line or cuss word in Hindi to root it culturally in India, while also speaking to the world’s audiences. And the film’s main antagonists are found in settings with a pronounced saffron/red colour palette – probably hinting at the revival of the Hindutva sentiment in India in the last few years.
Patel’s film is a mishmash of influences – where it goes through a familiar route of tracing the steps of an origin story for a hero — unnamed (he’s credited as ‘kid’) and played by Patel — emerging from the streets, looking to avenge his childhood horrors against a man who sits atop a skyscraper. The ‘slumdog’ schemes his way into the skyscraper – an uber-elite club called Kings – and literally works his way up: from the basement kitchen to the restaurant to the VIP lounge, and finally to the King’s suite, where the film’s antagonist (played by Makarand Deshpande), a Hindu godman called Baba Shakti, lives. The Baba endorses the Sovereign Party as an election approaches.
Monkey Man appears to be searching for its “authentic” tone through its 125-minute runtime. And it all aligns together during a crucial sequence, where the beaten hero will resurrect. Patel’s nameless protagonist approaches a punching bag, and pummels it with nothing to lose. But all of a sudden, the training montage finds an unlikely companion in a tabla beat. In a casting coup, Patel gets maestro Zakir Hussain to act in a tiny role in his directorial debut, where Hussain’s deft beats become a reckoning for the hero to rediscover the fight within him. The protagonist – who was earlier slugging it out with the bag and his opponents – suddenly finds his rhythm to himself. His brawny assault style is replaced with a more graceful, calculated way of fighting. The intensity isn’t less, but the tabla beats form a beautiful jugalbandi (an improvised performance) with the thumps on the punching bag. A hero is reborn. It’s during this scene that Patel’s East-meets-West style really sings. Even if the film’s cultural identity is on dodgy ground until then, in this sequence the emotional truth takes over. Much like our masala potboilers, the scene doesn’t have to look credible; it only has to feel credible.
The release for Patel’s debut as a writer/director has been long delayed. Bought by Netflix in early 2021, the release was indefinitely held back apparently because of its political commentary against India’s right-wing forces. The film was seen by director/producer Jordan Peele, who played a part in getting Universal Studios to purchase it from Netflix, and help its release abroad. The film still hasn’t got a theatrical release in India, despite initial reports claiming it would on April 19. Will any streaming platform launch it, especially during the election season and more so after the Annapoorani fiasco?
The political commentary in Patel’s film is well-intentioned and brave, at a time when Indian filmmakers are removing all references to Hindu mythology from their scripts, unless in the most reverential way possible. But there also seems to be a childlike innocence in the way Patel approaches the fractured topic of religion, only grappling with binaries. Monkey Man attacks religion as a way to consolidate power, and control the masses. And yet, there isn’t anything remotely specific about the characters of Baba Shakti or Rana (Sikander Kher), the chief of police and the Godman’s main enabler. There’s a dialogue about Hindus, Muslims and Christians at a brawling venue, which feels strained. There’s a montage featuring Muslims being beaten, with a slogan of Jai Shri Ram been raised, that seems too specific a moment (and abrupt) in the film’s largely generic worldview.
As an action film though, Monkey Man is lean and robust, much like the protagonist’s physique. There are at least a couple of superbly choreographed action sequences, the first being where the camera (Sharone Meir) swivels with an axe, again in the climax when it follows the protagonist as he goes on an unbroken minute-long rampage inside a kitchen. Meir’s work here reminded me of his frenetic close-ups in Whiplash (2015) – especially when Miles Teller soaks his bleeding fingers in ice water. There’s an unflinching way to how Meir visualises suffering.
A lot of the film becomes a bit too focused on the protagonist’s trauma – eating away crucial space for backstories for the supporting cast. Dhulipala’s Sita – an unlikely ally that the protagonist finds amongst all the debauchery – gets one damsel-in-distress line among a handful of dialogue, when she tells him to not feed a stray dog. “Don’t give her hope,” she says. Pitobash Tripathy, an excellent actor to have in any film, isn’t able to transcend his space as a sidekick, Alphonso. Both Deshpande and Kher – as the film’s two primary antagonists – are too unidimensional and merely end up as concepts of evil, instead of actual human beings. Vipin Sharma is an interesting choice to play a transgender warrior – an idea that works better in theory than in the film.
One can hardly fault the effort in Monkey Man – it’s clear that Patel has a few radical ideas and sensibilities that he would like to marry together, but fails to do so in a sustained manner. There are echoes of a ‘70s masala Hindi film, especially in a line like “Meri maa ki dua (My mother’s blessings)” – whose efficacy lies fully on Patel’s conviction as he delivers it. It’s clear that Patel has borrowed from the influences of the directors he’s worked with. There’s a bit of Danny Boyle’s fluidity from Slumdog Millionaire (Patel’s breakout film on the world stage) in a sequence where a purse changes hands a few times before reaching the protagonist whilst a rap song plays in the background. There’s a sly callback to Garth Davis’s Lion (2017) – when a kid named Sheru (Patel’s name in that movie) is told to take the protagonist to a gun-runner. The film has the bare-fisted action of Anthony Maras’s Hotel Mumbai (2019). But I wish Monkey Man also had the internal conflict of David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021).
