'Monkey Man': You, Sir, Are No John Wick

Dev Patel directs, co-writes, and stars in this oddly-boring revenge movie.

There’s a scene in Monkey Man (not to be confused with the recent DogMan) where its 30-something protagonist, Kid, takes his shirt off, and all these women nearby start hootin’ and hollerin’. It is one of only two scenes in the movie that made me laugh, although I suspect it wasn’t meant to be funny: I laughed because Kid is played by Dev Patel.

I didn’t laugh because I don’t believe women would make a big fuss upon seeing Patel shirtless: he’s a very handsome man, and he’s in incredible shape. I laughed because Patel also directed and co-wrote the movie. Which means Patel sat in a room, thought, “It would be a great idea to have a scene where I take my shirt off and women lose their minds;” wrote that scene down; showed that scene to other people; collaborated on that scene with an array of highly skilled professional artisans; cast that scene; staged that scene; shot that scene; sent that footage to an editor; and in all likelihood gave notes the editor notes on that scene to make it closer to what it was envisioning in his head. Millions of dollars were spent so that Dev Patel could live his dream of being treated like one of the dudes from Magic Mike.

That’s why I laughed.

It’s not as though Monkey Man is the first time a famous actor has gifted themselves a vanity project before. But it’s also a bad vanity project, which means it is subject to ridicule.

Patel is a talented and well-respected actor generally known for playing intelligent, sensitive characters in such acclaimed works as The Green Knight, The Newsroom, and Lion. But I surmise he’s not satisfied with his current level of success: I can think of no other reason for Monkey Man to exist other than for Patel to show Hollywood that he can be the kind of leading man who’s short on words and long on punches. Only time will tell whether or not the movie is a success in that regard. Personally, yes, I now believe that the young man from Slumdog Millionaire can royally kick ass. What I’m not convinced of is Patel’s understanding of narrative.

Monkey Man is really three movies stitched together.

The first is ostensibly a revenge film. It falls short in that regard, however, by withholding the motivation for the Kid’s vengeance until fairly late in the movie. Which you can totally get away with if you’re Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West) or John Boorman (Point Blank), but maybe not so much if you once co-starred in The Exotic Marigold Hotel. There’s a reason we already know why Paul Kersey, Eric Draven, and John Wick are angry before they starts cappin’ motherfuckers: it gives us a reason to root for them.

The second is a “badass saves his new community” movie, which we often associate White savior movies like Avatar and The Last Samurai. Monkey Man is obviously not a White savior movie, but it is a cis savior movie, because Kid’s new community are transgender and intersex hijaras… although Kid doesn’t truly adopt the hijara lifestyle, and is not, himself, transgender or intersex. There’s a scene where their leader tells him to “Remember who you are,” but there’s no indication that he has forgotten who he is (metaphorically speaking, of course). In other words, the hijaras serve no thematic purpose in the story; they are nothing more than the oppressed people Kid needs to save to make sure the audience likes him, because they can’t be sympathetic to his desire for revenge since they don’t know how he was wronged.

Monkey Man is also, occasionally, a gentle, esoteric, arthouse tone poem. These parts of the movie are few and far between, but they’re still irritating and kind of highlight one of the movie’s biggest problems: it’s not content to “just” be an entertaining action movie. It could have opened with its reveal and then launched into 90 minutes of Hell having no fury like Dev Patel scorned, but instead it’s 120 minutes because it has all this other unnecessary shit tacked onto it.

Truth be told, though, even the action scenes aren’t great. Patel gives every scene the slick neon lighting scheme and ADD-afflicted editing style of a Michael Bay movie, but shoots everything the close-up, the-camera-operator-was-having-a-seizure-when-we-filmed-this style of a Paul Greengrass movie. The point is, you often can’t see shit. There are a couple of exceptions; most notably, there a terrific scene where Kid, unarmed, fights a guy wielding an axe. These sequences dare to be fun, and there’s too few of them in the movie.

So, sure, by all means, cast Dev Patel in the next Matrix movie. Just please don’t let him direct it.