Written by Gabriel Serrano Denis
In the era of Marvel Studios, DC Entertainment, and everything in between, many filmmakers have professed a love for action and comic book characters that for the most part comes through in the finished products. However, many of these films lack a certain passion to them, as if the filmmakers’ confessed love was nothing but a blank to fill in a questionnaire – the heart is just not there and it shows. Dev Patel, a great actor who’s shown his loving commitment to his roles time and again, kicks the door open as director and co-writer for an action odyssey made from an overwhelming amount of respect and reverence for the most visceral of cinema.
Monkey Man, Patel’s debut as director, not only wears its influences proudly on its bloody sleeves, but also infuses them with his cultural background and intense commitment to character. The action choreography oozes style and Patel’s love for Asian action cinema is on full display in every frame, in every character, in every story beat. It’s a romance with violence that grows into a primal scream for justice against those who oppress others, and it all comes to us now in vivid, explosive 4K, as close as it was meant to be seen and heard.
Monkey Man is a simple enough story: a boy grows with vengeance in his heart after his mother and village are killed by high-ranking officials. He acquires money through violent underground wrestling matches while investigating how to get close to the man responsible for his mother’s death. Once he secures a job at the most exclusive club in the fictional Indian city of Yatana, he inches closer and closer to finally getting his revenge, hitting several obstacles, setbacks, and people along the way.
What separates Monkey Man from the rest of the recent boom of post-John Wick revenge bloodfests is a keen interest in character development and cultural relevance. The film is built on an idiosyncratic criminal world where villages can be razed to make way for temples for higher castes, and the protagonist’s underdog status is not just a simple cliché but a genuine obstacle in his journey towards reaching his target. Patel’s interest on character and social inequity raises the stakes of the action and positions the character’s development in the realm of neo-noir, much more so than the John Wick series.
This is due largely to the fact that while John Wick mines the choreography and style of South Korean action cinema, Monkey Man goes further and pays tribute to the nastier and morally complex films within the genre. One can see traces of Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life, Jung Byung-jil’s The Villainess, and Lee Jeong-beom’s The Man From Nowhere throughout the story as well as from the Indonesian noir actioners of Gareth Evans (The Raid) and Timo Tjahjanto (Headshot, The Night Comes For Us). All these filmmakers boast wild action and choreography in their respective films, but they also deftly portray revenge stories with a noir veneer, with characters diving into horrific underworlds to quench their bloodlust. However, Patel flips the script in a way and finds hope in hell for the underdog, and this opens the door for a uniquely visceral and colorful experience.
All this to say that Monkey Man is a deeply personal, and emotionally resonant story for its actor and protagonist, but it also has some of the best action sequences of the decade so far. While it is not the action rollercoaster that the John Wick films and The Raid are, when Monkey Man goes brutal it goes all in. The 4K Blu-Ray’s stunning and crisp image quality captures all the bloodletting in intense detail, while every blow and broken bone sounds painfully glorious thanks to the pristine sound mix. Of particular note is the bone crunching sound design mixed with the amazing score by Jed Kurzel and the myriad of pitch-perfect songs curated by Peymon Maskan and Jenna Wilson. Composed of several one-shots and seamless editing, the action sequences are immersive and gleefully violent thanks to Sharone Meir’s expressionistic rendition of both vibrant nightclub environments and seedy backalleys and brothels.
The Blu-Ray also includes several deleted scenes and alternate openings and endings that somehow manage to make the whole ordeal even more impressive. The scenes left on the cutting room floor, though understandably cut due to potential pacing and rhythm issues, feature more dizzying camerawork and strong character work from the supporting cast, including Indian actors Pitobash, Sikandar Kher, and Makarand Deshpande. Apart from feature-length commentary by Patel, producers Jomon Thomas and Sam Sahni and co-producer Raghuvir Joshi, other bonus features include featurettes on the making of the film’s action sequences, the roots of the story and the cultural background, as well as an insightful piece on the arduous journey to get the film made and how it found the perfect producing partner in Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. Like another of Dev Patel’s influences, Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, Monkey Man is a film you feel viscerally and emotionally, no small leap for a first-time action filmmaker.
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