‘Monkey Man’ apes other action films but has a distinctive Indian setting
Dev Patel has had a wide variety of roles over the years, from the up-from-struggle kid in “Slumdog Millionaire” to the emotionally wounded man searching for his roots in “Lion,” but now he has decided to rip a page from the Liam Neeson and Keanu Reeves playbook. In the largely entertaining and exceedingly violent “Monkey Man,” he plays a nameless and reluctant action hero, one forced into duty by the evil that was visited on him as a child when his mom was killed by corrupt local officials in cahoots with a dangerous religious and nationalist political leader. Our “Man With No Name” is out for revenge and, to quote Neeson in “Taken,” he has a “very particular set of skills.”
While the arc of the story is overly familiar, Patel (who is making his directing debut) puts his stamp on it by setting “Monkey Man” in India (though it was filmed in Indonesia). From referencing a speeding tuk-tuk to the tensions between Muslims and Hindus, the Diwali celebration to the presence of the Hindu god Hanuman, a creature with the face of a monkey and the body of a man, “Monkey Man” is steeped in the culture and the colors of the Indian subcontinent.
When viewers meet our hero, he’s taking a beating in the ring in an underground fight event where his shtick is that he dresses like a monkey. But he’s the guy who has to take the fall to earn his measly paycheck, doled out to him by Tiger, the sleazy South African ringmaster (played with glee by Sharlto Copley from “District 9”). But our guy has big plans.
Thanks to our hero’s connections on the street, he arranges for thieves to steal the purse of Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar), a foul-mouthed brothel/club owner, in a wonderfully choreographed sequence. He returns the purse to her and uses his supposed good deed as leverage to ask for a job in her organization. As Rana (Sikandar Kher), the cop who killed his mother, and Baba Shakti (Makrand Deshpande) hang out in her swanky club, he sees this as an opportunity to finally uphold his family’s honor.
Co-written by Patel with Paul Angunawela and John Collee, “Monkey Man” begins rather slowly, as Patel builds his world. Action fans lured in by the siren song of the film’s head-slamming trailer might start to fidget. But just hold on, because once “Monkey Man” kicks into high gear, it turns out to be a bone-crunching ride, though it never reaches the insane level of homicidal anarchy as any of the “John Wick” films. But the Keanu Reeves character is namechecked here by our hero’s mouthy sidekick, Alphonso (Pitobash).
What’s most impressive is that Patel shows off a confidence and swagger as both an action actor and director that many probably didn’t know he had. While it is sometimes hard to discern what’s going on in some of the fight scenes, they still land with a kinetic force.
A person doesn’t have to be any sort of grand visionary to guess that, if the box-office numbers are good, “Monkey Man” will spawn a sequel. While the specter of franchise building often is something to dread, the first installment here is unique enough to make the promise of a “Monkey Man II” less foreboding than it otherwise might be.