Monkey Man (2024)

Watched 4/7/24 (theater)

A bat movie in a monkey’s clothing (they even lifted one of the posters!), Dev Patel clearly has a deep affection for the caped crusader’s oeuvre, and a worthy respect for the importance of sensory feeling in fight scenes, performing his reimagining of Batman and other vigilante tales in a high-adrenaline, gutsy, stylish fashion. You don’t see this kind of intensity all of the time—and you rarely ever see a first-time director using his acting cred to make a violent action blast to the head. Usually it’s an indie drama or some other unambitious, somewhat pretentious shtick. That all being stated, I am comfortable saying that the dark, vicious alley that this movie operates in is really up my alley—really happy that Dev Patel chose to do something like this. Really cool move. I also think there are some really huge flaws with this, but I am happy to overlook some of them in favor of the formidable viciousness of the action set pieces, no matter how shabbily shot parts of them are.

Patel clearly understands what does and does not get the job done in the fight choreography department, insisting that almost every fight have a creative moment of violence or gadgetry…or a bone-breaking finishing move with maximum blood. He’s able to execute simple axe swings or knife stabs in increasingly unorthodox new ways. Unfortunately, some of it gets drowned out in some really poor shaky cam and under-lit room layouts. Even outside of the action and stunts, dialogue scenes in this struggle to find the right balance in their lighting and the movie does take on a bit of a flabby feel when this comes into contact with the movie’s script issues. 

With everything from random friends of the main character suddenly learning how to fight like Spartans to a very rushed and clumsily paced opening 25 minutes, this is a silly, messy movie with some really dumb moments and confounding editing choices. The whole thing honestly feels cobbled together at times, with some characters not being set up nearly enough and others being forgotten about completely.

That Patel is able to sell his character so believably is the movie’s greatest boon. A rage that vacillates evenly from melancholy to unhinged would be really hard to do with the wrong actor in the lead role’s shoes, but Patel never lets you forget for a second that he is playing a broken, beaten character. His direction in that department succeeds, too, highlighting the noteworthy facial malleability he knows he can nail. It’s a shame then, when cheesy movie-magic montages featuring an entire group of cheerleaders or ham-fisted metaphor setups like the stray dog rear their awkward heads. The training montage could have been worse, but I do wish with how seriously the rest of this takes itself it had decided to chop the wince-worthy moments of uplift. It just didn’t fit for me in a movie that was so refreshingly black-hearted, with no character even SUGGESTING that revenge is a bad idea. Not enough movies allow their main character to execute on their vengeance with uncomplicated feelings or at all. Was pleasantly surprised how far this took that, almost(!) entirely avoiding the eye rolls that can come with modern blockbuster filmmaking.

While the shaky cam and bad lighting really bummed me out, Patel’s choreography team was such a lifeblood to these action scenes that, coupled with the decision in the early assassination sequence to make the Monkey Man an understandably nervous wreck, I found myself feeling consistently injected with excitement opposed to frustration whenever I disagreed with other directing choices or felt the script and pacing holes that at times made themselves quite apparent. This was a really fun watch, and it was nice to see such a skinny dude as the one kicking so much ass. Gave hope to us skinny dudes everywhere who don’t have a ton of interest anymore in putting on 20lbs of muscle like the guys in these roles usually do. I liked this a lot—made me want to punch or bite someone.

6.5/10