It’s something of a miracle that Monkey Man exists. 

It’s an action-drama made by a lesser-known actor when — according to some — the traditional leading man and action hero has already started to disappear from the cultural landscape. A movie held in post-production hell by Netflix for years until being saved by a sympathetic Jordan Peele. And a story so violent and overtly critical of real-life social injustice in India some have speculated it may end up delayed, censored or never releasing in that country at all.

So with nearly everything about Dev Patel’s Monkey Man working against it, the fact audiences can actually go see it in theatres this weekend is a testament to the vision, charisma and passion of Patel himself.

Which makes it all the more painful to say that Monkey Man‘s muddled plot and dizzying edits left me with the one feeling you don’t want from a high-stakes action thriller: disappointment.

With that sad fact out of the way, it’s important to acknowledge it is not a terrible film, and Patel (who both wrote and directed the film) is not a bad filmmaker.

WATCH | Monkey Man trailer: 

In Monkey Man, we follow Kid (Patel) — an Indian man scraping by a living as a heel in an underground fighting ring, with the requisitely unappetizing job of being beaten to a bloody pulp in front of a screaming crowd. Kid is manipulated and short-changed by the fighting ring’s manager (Sharlto Copley, showcasing the grinning-scumbag muscle flexing he’s perfected in everything from Oldboy to Hardcore Henry) as he takes those beatings.

And until he eventually breaks off on a journey of drama, vengeance and punching against India’s elite, he continues to fight and lose (badly) night after night, while hidden behind an equally beaten up ape mask. 

Cross-cultural connections

The mask in question begins as a sort of random creative flourish, but quickly ties directly into Patel’s central metaphor: the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman, a traditional symbol of devotion, loyalty, service and strength which, Patel has said, has direct parallels to superheroes in the West, but has also been used as a symbol by the country’s current nationalist government.

Patel uses those cross-cultural connections to make some obviously prescient points. Weaving between Kid’s necessarily traumatic past and a present-day descent into a criminal and political underworld, Monkey Man does everything it can to hammer the Hanuman-Kid connection home.

At the same time, the lush cinematography and meticulous references to Indian mythology and culture mark Patel as an artist coming into his own. There is a clear vision here both behind and in front of the camera, infusing the world with harsh and realistic vignettes into Mumbai’s poverty, inequality and caste system.

Patel’s acting, meanwhile, is second to none — to be expected from the man who dazzled in The Green Knight. And as he labours to connect the relentlessly self-flagellating Kid with the legend of Hanuman — which itself starts out about a misbehaving child burdened by past mistakes, forgetting the power he has to change his own destiny — Patel’s potential as a storyteller shines through.

Overthinking action

All of this is almost enough to make you forget what you’re watching is ultimately a semi-shallow, somewhat amateurish collage of other, better action movies. 

The obvious comparison is John Wick — one that has been made so many times even Patel is getting tired of referencing it. But where Wick dusted off and resurrected the Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and still-shuffling-along Tom Cruise-type hero by putting its action front and centre, Monkey Man‘s reach exceeds its grasp. 

John Wick uses an admittedly paper-thin plot as an excuse to launch Keanu Reeves on a revenge journey full of non-stop book-kills and pen-stabbing. The point of Wick is not to mine its character for anything beyond an unbridled rage, but instead to set him up for action. Monkey Man, however, tries to balance its gruesome violence with a incisive political critique, cutting between character-driven drama and culture-bridging genre-bender.

It’s a balance first-time director Patel doesn’t yet have the chops to land. The long interludes between fights turn Monkey Man into a plot merely punctuated by action, rather than making it about more than the action. 

And most of those interludes are just elements cut out of other action movies and pasted in here. There’s the scrappy street kid of Get the Gringo, damsel in distress of You Were Never Really Here and the unfortunately near-universal trope of a one-dimensional dead woman written only as a motivator for the main character.

Though some of these tropes are solid in their respective source material, Patel hasn’t quite mastered the technique of making them work as they should. The extraneous characters deliver their lines like they’re filling out an action-thriller checklist, and most could’ve ended up on the cutting room floor without affecting the plot in any way.

Throwing fight scenes at the wall 

But even when Patel does go to the mat, there’s something missing — and vaguely nauseating. Instead of backing up the camera to show his actors’ full bodies as they fight, as established by films like The Raid — relying on the athleticism of its actors and talent of its choreographers to build visual excitement — Monkey Man throws a little bit of everything at the wall to see what sticks. 

Here, we whip between blurry fists, legs and blades with all the smoothness and clarity of a cellphone camera in an active washing machine. Other times the camera jolts and zooms along with the kicks and punches to make the blows feel real — or even momentarily goes first-person POV like a dark sequel to the GoPro-mounted Hardcore Henry. 

Like its lagging middle section and cast of characters that could have benefited from a good culling, it’s all part of the same problem. While promising, Monkey Man is a slightly self-indulgent first effort by an otherwise promising creator who maybe should’ve spent more time focusing on both killing bad guys, and killing his darlings.