B | A man seeks revenge on the spiritual guru who burned down his village and killed his mother. Directed by Dev Patel Starring Dev Patel, Makarand Deshpande, and Vipin Sharma Review by Jon Kissel |

The film is divided into two halves, demarcated by this failure. In the first, the Kid is best at absorbing pain, a skill that makes him relentless but ineffectual. Suffering isn’t helping him achieve his goal. In the second, after being seriously wounded and rehabilitating in a temple run by ostracized transgender women, he’s able to purge some of his guilt over failing to save his mother and becomes more effective. The fulcrum at the temple is surprisingly affecting, if only because the plot of the film is otherwise on rails. Monkey Man is working through a predictable arc of rise-fall-rise, and the transition from fall to rise is the film at its best. Not only does it feature a high-quality training montage set to some fantastic drum-playing, it’s spurred by Alpha (Vipin Sharma), the high priestess of the temple, who has undoubtedly had a similarly difficult life but exudes a hard-won serenity that is the Kid’s implicit goal. Sharma is not a trans woman, and I might be way ahead of my skis here, but I feel he embodies the kind of perfect self-knowledge that would drive a person to live as a trans woman in spite of all of the abuse and stigma that society is going to heap on them. I was shocked that this bloody actioner pulled those emotions out of me.
The trans community at the temple and the aggressive anti-Hindutva thread running through Monkey Man frame it as an anti-RRR. Where that film left a fascistic taste in my mouth, this is a ground-up revolt against one powerful sector of Indian society. There is no more worthy target for comeuppance than a wealthy man who got wealthy hawking spirituality, doubly so when that spirituality is used to undergird the status quo. Per our long-ago discussion of First Reformed, religion that comforts instead of challenges the powerful is useless. Monkey Man chooses a perfect villain, and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s received in an India that is less and less receptive to something this hostile to the status quo. The poor in Monkey Man, numerous as they are, are shown to be poor because of what the society values, and it is revolted by grinding poverty in the shadow of gaudy skyscrapers.
This is all in addition to the kind of bone-crunching action that gets people through the door in the first place. From Tiger’s boxing ring to the various levels of the club, Monkey Man features plenty of fisticuffs and knifeplay, much of it filmed with few enough takes that Patel and his extensive stunt crew don’t use the camera to cheat. This is an intense physical performance from Patel in what is clearly a passion project, and he put that passion onscreen in how wild and desperate his performance often is, whether he’s fighting or not. However, I do think the action is missing one thing and could’ve lost another. A martial arts film like The Raid immediately marks itself as emblematic of an Indonesian fighting stye. Monkey Man gives no Indian-equivalent impression, and after Across the Spider-Verse intimated at an Indian martial arts style, I was expecting one here. As far as what’s extra, Patel’s camera is too kinetic for me, and not because I watched through a sudden spell of vertigo-induced nausea unrelated to the film itself. He uses all the tricks, from inverted frames to fuzzy images after a hit to the head. The standard in this genre is to let takes run as long as possible, and while that can get tiresome and brash, I do think it’s the right impulse to let the choreography and physicality speak for itself. Monkey Man knows this, but gets distracted by all the things a camera can do.
If Monkey Man’s action leaves something to be desired, it compensates in the quieter moments. This is an ambitious directorial debut from an actor whose last several years have been marked by great choices and great collaborators. Monkey Man leaves Patel plenty of room to grow, and it’s clear that he’s got a stunner in his future, whether it’s set in India or not. Might be hard for him to get support from the government after his Modi-equivalent is shown scurrying away from danger. B