Review of the film “Monkeyman” by Dev Patel

The action movie Monkeyman is being released, the directorial debut of actor Dev Patel, in which he himself played the main role. Yulia Shagelman considers his baptism of fire successful, although not without some stylistic roughness, and looks forward to his next works with interest.

Monkeyman, as they say, is Dev Patel’s dream project, the implementation of which took him five years since 2018, when the future film was first announced. This deadline included writing a script with John Colley and Paul Angunawela and an attempt to attract Neill Blomkamp, ​​whose director Patel played in Chappie (2015), as director. The South African director declined, but his mascot actor Sharlto Copley remained in the film in his traditional role as the slimy supporting scoundrel. The filming itself took the most time and effort, during which Patel and the company had to painfully overcome Covid and budget restrictions and numerous injuries incurred by the star in the action scenes. The distribution fate of the film, originally intended for release on Netflix, changed at the last moment when the finished film was taken under the wing of producer Jordan Peele, who believed that the film deserved the big screen.

The result confirms what Patel himself says in interviews: that in fact he had been preparing for this film for even longer, since childhood, dreaming of one day making the kind of movie that he fell in love with as a boy. It should have noble heroes, villainous villains, spectacular fights, adrenaline-pumping chases and dramatic contrasts between the good represented by the poor and honest people, and the evil represented by rich liars and hypocrites. Although Patel was born in Britain to Indian immigrants from Kenya, he draws generously from the Indian cinematic tradition, so there is a lot of sentimentality and religious symbolism in Monkeyman. The use of the latter in the neighborhood, for example, with pictures of night club life, as well as rather explicit allusions to the political situation in India right now, creates censorship difficulties for the film in the historical homeland of the author, where it may not be released at all.

His second source of inspiration is Korean and Hong Kong action films, which provide the film with an increased degree of bloodiness, and somewhere nearby are John Wick, which is directly mentioned in one of the dialogues, and Tarantino, and Danny Boyle, in whom Patel played his first significant role in Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Extreme close-ups are mixed with fluid one-shot shots and hand-held camerawork in fight sequences, and the neon of the big city gives way to flashbacks from idyllic village life in harmony with nature, which Patel perhaps slightly overuses. The whole thing could, and sometimes does, become a jumble of references, homages and borrowed visual styles, but the sincerity with which the film is shot gives it thematic and formal integrity. When a meeting with a prostitute with a heart of gold (Sobhita Dhulipala) is soundtracked by the song “Roxanne”, and this is done not with a meta-post-postmodern wink, but seriously, you can, of course, laugh at the straightforwardness of the creators, but you can also envy him.

As a child, his mother (Aditi Kalkunte) tells the future avenging hero, whose real name we never learn, the legend of Hanuman, a demigod in the form of a monkey. After corrupt security forces in the service of the pseudo-guru Baba Shakti (Makrand Deshpande), who preaches love, humility and poverty, but in fact uses people’s suffering for personal enrichment, burn down their village, the guy finds himself on the mean streets of the fictional Yatana, which replaces the real one in the film Mumbai. Here he, wearing a monkey mask, participates in fights without rules, losing to rivals for money and dreaming of revenge on the corrupt police chief Rana (Sikander Kher), who personally killed his mother.

In fact, the entire content of the film is the hero’s journey from one large-scale action scene to another, from an unfinished attempt at revenge to a successful one, if, of course, we consider the many brutal deaths as luck (however, all the deceased were bad people). On this path, he will have to penetrate the lair of rich perverts, ruled by the mafia queen Queenie (Ashwini Khalsekar), find a friend (Pitobash Tripathi), although a drug dealer, but deep down not completely corrupt, and toughen himself morally and physically, in which he is helped the outcasts of the outcasts are members of the hijra community, the untouchable caste. While hanging out with them after the first skirmish with Rana and his henchmen, he completely opens his soul to Hanuman, and also trains, building up his muscles and stamina: here director Dev Patel does not deny himself the pleasure of showing actor Dev Patel in all his physical glory.

Quiet moments in the middle drag the film slightly, but then it picks up its frantic energy again to accelerate towards a dark finale. Like many revenge films, Monkeyman proves that it doesn’t actually bring peace of mind – but it does provide a thrilling spectacle.