Monkey Man: Portraying Anger on Film
Monkey Man is a film that’s been pushed around as Brown John Wick through its trailers, and it makes good on that promise. It’s jam-packed with energetic fight scenes (including some glorious mouth action), beautiful locations, a fun villain, some interesting visuals, all packaged in a simple, barebones revenge plot. Dev Patel delivers a phenomenal debut film, made even more impressive after reading about the plethora of issues this film underwent during production (thank you, COVID). If you haven’t seen it yet… What are you doing here? Go watch it! There be spoilers in these parts of town.
Now, the people who have seen Monkey Man might leave thinking, “Yeah, it was fun, but Kid’s whole plan isn’t very well-thought-out. He’s not fixing anything he could very well be making things worse by killing Shakti at the end. That’s some lazy writing.” And I’d agree with you! I think the film does a pretty bad job of suggesting solutions for the problems it brings up. I think Kid is a very shallow protagonist. And I think these are good things.
Films have been used for social commentary essentially since their conception (watch Metropolis, it’s pretty good). In my eyes, these films generally do three things: present a section of the world, either as it is or through an allegory; show the characters’ emotions due to this setting; and suggest changes/have that system taken down.
Monkey Man takes an approach that I feel is different enough to be worth talking about: it doesn't concern itself with fixing the problem or offering solutions; as far as Dev Patel is concerned, that's someone else's issue. As for the character’s emotions, it's purely a vessel to convey his anger at the situation. The core premise of ‘You killed my mum, now I'm going to kill you’ isn't inherently political; it's the plot of The Lion King. The context this very basic plot has been dropped into makes all the difference, from Kid’s origins being tied to a holy site reclamation, Officer Rana’s ties to a Hindu nationalist political party, to him conveniently being rescued from India’s very clean water bodies by hijra people. All of these are topics that Patel clearly feels strongly about and that he has spoken about extensively in interviews for this film.
Kid himself doesn't really care about any of this, he just wants his revenge, and I find his blind rage weirdly endearing. He’s shown to be a very driven man who’s been wronged, and wants to right specifically those wrongs. His goals are very short-term, and his actions do leave essentially everyone’s lives off for the worse at the end: the party will gain additional momentum due to the murders, their actions will continue, and Kid himself is dead. It’s a very pointless film through that lens, and I love that it’s not trying to be anything grander than it needs to be. This could have been a serious film tearing down the social hierarchy in South Asia, but instead it’s just a film where a man bites off another man’s nose while an item number plays in the background (please sign my petition for Dev Patel to bite me), and you've got to respect that. It just shows you a corner of society, the ‘armpit of India’ as Patel has called it, says ‘I fucking hate this’, screams and then leaves. The fact that it will never get a theatrical release in the country it is literally about just hits the point home that much better.