There’s a common retort among action fans, when confronted by a seemingly appropriative studio product, to point out that most societies with a functional film industry can make their own action movies and typically do so with a cultural understanding that a Western filmmaker can’t properly grok. It’s an argument that seems to make sense on the surface – an appeal to authenticity with a healthy dash of contempt for action fans who aren’t as worldly – but falls apart when one takes into account the citizens of those countries or the massive diasporas around the world that like both styles of filmmaking, and that movies with a healthy dose of either can introduce different audiences to an entire section of world filmmaking that they’re unfamiliar with, or when a filmmaker like Dev Patel takes the reins of production. His debut feature, Monkey Man, is one of those features – sure, one could point to the Dhoom movies or RDR or the upcoming Kill as examples of Indian cinema doing action on its own terms – but Patel is intimately familiar with Hollywood and has made a Hollywood-styled John Wick riff that’s fully inclusive. Though not without its stumbles, Monkey Man is a fun debut that provides a pathway for the Wick riffs to continue innovating within the conventions that Keanu and company established.
Based on the story of Hanuman – a God placed in the form of a monkey king in Hindu lore – Money Man opens with a recitation of his tale, before we smash-cut to Kid (Patel) getting his tail whipped in the ring at a local underground fight circuit. He’s essentially a jobber – a skilled fighter paid by the scumbag who runs the joint (Sharlto Copley) to take brutal dives to build up certain talents – and he wears a monkey mask while getting his ass kicked in these animal-themed fights. But Kid’s got a bigger goal on his mind, using his connections on the street to work his way into a dishwashing position at a large hotel, where the rich and powerful wine, dine, and sex traffic young women. On the top floor of that building lives Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), a corrupt guru who has used his spiritual guidance to some pretty evil ends and with whom Kid has a bloody grudge. As he works his way up in the kitchen, he starts to see that things are even more depraved than he thought and discovers that Rana (Sikander Kher), a Police captain, is working as Baba’s pseudo-security. He hates Baba Shakti, but he really hates Rana, as the whole reason he’s sleeping in crowded slums and is full of vengeful hatred is directly due to the man’s interference in what was his pastoral childhood. So, he tries his best to take them on in a slippery and bloody fashion. He fails the first time around, narrowly escaping with his life, and must confront his demons in order to accomplish his goal: to tear down this evil enterprise with his own two fists.
Patel’s blend of Western and Eastern influences is, for the most part, pretty accomplished. There’s a fair amount of culture welding so that no member of the audience is left out (provided that they’re not one of those dudes that yell about having to read subtitles), where Indian members of the crowd can see their culture reflected on screen in an American-styled action fashion, and where Americans can learn more about Hindu legends and Indian customs without feeling like they’re sitting through a sociology lecture. Where it struggles is in aesthetics – the action filmmaking isn’t totally top-notch, as Patel enjoys shaky-cam immediacy often at the benefit of viewer understanding, and the soundtrack is just weird, made up of remixes of Western pop-and-rock that sound like scrapped versions of the slow-and-epic renditions you hear in every modern trailer these days (Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” shows up during a fight scene with the backing track stripped out and replaced with Hans Zimmer-style orchestral bleating). But Patel’s locked in with his audience – even if you dislike the shaky cam or roll your eyes at the music, there’ll be something soon enough to get you shouting and yelping with the rest of the crowd. He doesn’t shy away from extremity – there’s some fantastically staged gore here, done with an intensity and desperation that befits a character with little of Wick’s supernatural skill. The entire mixture is a novel, compelling one.
Novelty: that’s the key aspect that separates Monkey Man from a lot of the Wick imitators and puts it on par with the modern-day Under Sieges and Sudden Deaths – the Die Hard riffs that used a combination of personality and goofiness to become memorable even if their elevator pitches sounded just like derivative bullshit – in the group (Nobody, etc.). If the modus operandi of the post-financial crisis and post-streaming era has been to “give the people what they want” in the form of the same old bullshit each week at the multiplex, the “want” has changed from identical and familiar superhero or horror pictures to something that operates within the boundaries of a recognizable genre while persistently elevating it. The Wick movies did this by growing in scale and style, and Monkey Man does this by expanding the purview of Western interpretations of this genre to include a wider variety of cultures and influences, with love and respect for the action heads that are going to come out and see this as well as the rest of the diverse crowd. It’s awesome that, in the midst of this story, Patel finds a way to include a very silly allusion to Commando in the middle of a fight scene – you know, the “I eat Green Berets for breakfast” scene, in which Arnie and Bill Duke bust through the wall of a couple in the middle of coitus while fighting in a motel room – which should tell you enough about Monkey Man’s tone and bona fides to get any skeptical viewer into an auditorium this weekend.