Dev’s ruthless killer makes John Wick look like John Inman
Monkey Man (18, 121 mins) Verdict: Going ape in India ★★✩✩✩
The First Omen (15, 120 mins) Verdict: Powerful prequel ★★★★✩
The Trouble With Jessica (15, 89 mins) Verdict: Where to start? ★✩✩✩✩
DEV PATEL is the writer, director, co-producer and star of Monkey Man, a revenge thriller set in a fictional Indian city seething with sectarian hatred.
Patel’s multi-faceted involvement explains a lot, because it’s hard to imagine anyone else casting the sweet-faced hero of Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and The Personal History Of David Copperfield (2019) as a vengeance-fuelled murderer so unrepentantly violent he makes John Wick look like John Inman.
Well, he doesn’t quite. But I’m sure you take the point. Patel’s unnamed killer, listed in the credits only as Kid, is certainly a ruthless liquidation machine comparable with Wick, the Keanu Reeves character who never met a heavy he didn’t shoot, stab, throttle or shove down a lift shaft.
As for dear old Inman, his catchphrase as the camp menswear assistant Mr Humphries, which he trilled in every episode of the 1970s sitcom Are You Being Served?, was ‘I’m free!’
Kid, by contrast, is not free. He is enslaved by the compulsion to avenge his beloved mother, whose death, at the hands of a corrupt cop, he watched as a child. And he is also enslaved by Indian society itself, ruled by the privileged at the expense of the oppressed.
Patel deserves some credit for trying to give his retribution story a spot of cultural context. On the other hand, the way Monkey Man all but fetishises extreme violence raises the suspicion that the other stuff is just an excuse for him to unleash his inner Bruce Lee.
Patel has often talked about his boyhood admiration for the martial arts star, so maybe at some level it was frustrating for him to bumble around as the engagingly hapless Sonny Kapoor in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, when all he really wanted to do was kick the living daylights out of people in his own version of Enter The Dragon.
Monkey Man, his debut as a director, takes its title from an old Hindu legend which beguiled Kid as a child and has also inspired his persona on the city’s underground fighting circuit, which is run by a sleazy South African promoter played by Sharlto Copley. Kid wears an ape mask in the ring which gives him an air of mystique, even though he keeps getting battered.
BACK in the country that gave him his big break, Patel again plays a slumdog fighting the system, only this time a lot more literally. Kid is taking dives for money, enabling him to fund his real agenda against not just the corrupt cop (now the powerful chief of police) but all those he considers complicit in the death of his mother, including a charismatic political leader.
His journey of revenge is mostly a solo effort, but he acquires some improbable sidekicks along the way, above all the members of a strange transgender commune, who teach him spiritual virtues to complement his impressive killing skills.
By now he is the most wanted man in India, but an ability to fight like Bruce Lee, wield a knife like Gordon Ramsay and a gun like Annie Oakley, escape across rooftops like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible and drive a tuktuk like Lewis Hamilton will stand him in the best of stead in a film that is undoubtedly slick, stylish even, but disturbingly in thrall to the creed of violence.
■ THERE is more disturbing content in The First Omen, notionally a prequel to The Omen (1976), though it stands on its own as a gripping horror film that unfolds like a thriller, and contains a superb central performance by the 24-year-old English actress Nell Tiger Free.
She plays a young American nun who in 1971 arrives to work at an orphanage in Rome, and there uncovers some deeply sin ister goings on. A powerful cabal of clerics has decided that the only way to stop galloping secularism is to bring the masses back to the church through fear, so naturally they plot a way of birthing the Antichrist.
It’s a nuttily compelling premise, what you might call the Devil and the Holy See, and Arkasha Stevenson’s film realises it splendidly.
Charles Dance has a pre-titles cameo, Ralph Ineson is excellent as an excommunicated Irish priest, and the Eternal City of 50- odd years ago is convincingly re- created. I found it harder to believe in Bill Nighy as a creepy cardinal, as solidly wooden as his crucifix, but you can’t have everything.
■ IN The Trouble With Jessica, Sarah (Shirley Henderson) and Tom (Alan Tudyk) appear to have everything, but actually they are crippled by financial problems and must therefore sell their huge North London home. Regrettably, during a dinner party with friends (Olivia Williams, Rufus Sewell, Indira Varma), one of the guests inconsiderately commits suicide in the garden, making the property less saleable.
All this is presumably meant as a satire on the middle classes, but actually the big middle-class joke is the film itself: clunkily theatrical, with horrible, complacent characters and a desperately over-baked running gag about the French dessert clafoutis that, frankly, set my teeth on edge.