‘Monkey Man’ Hits During Its Fight Sequences, But Gets Muddled When It Tries To Explore Religious Extremism in India

There’s a common, condescending refrain about action movies: leave your brain at home. Focused more on fight sequences and big explosions than story, the genre is usually propped up by the pure adrenaline that comes from its choreography. But in Dev Patel’s directorial debut Monkey Man, the Indian-British actor isn’t satisfied with making a hollow film that’s just a vehicle for flashy action — a welcome step forward. The problem, however, is that the story he lands on is overstuffed and convoluted, without a salient point of view on the many religious and socio-political ideas it introduces. 

In Monkey Man, Patel plays a low-class fighter, simply called Kid, who fashions himself a real-life Hanuman, the monkey-headed deity depicted in the Hindu epic Ramayana. In the Ramayana, Hanuman is a devout ally of Rama and aids him in rescuing Rama’s wife Sita from the clutches of the evil Ravana. Patel’s version instead takes vengeance on an evil police officer whom he witnessed indiscriminately kill his mom and burn down his entire village when he was a child. 

There is some critique to be had about the film’s political stance: Monkey Man seems to take aim at the rising right-wing Hindutva movement in India from the POV of a moderate Hindu, but it doesn’t fully delineate the beliefs of each side. Simultaneously, it introduces flashes of real-life riot footage against Muslims without having a Muslim character in the fold as a comp for the film’s story. It’s clear Patel is interested in the current political landscape in his home country, but the execution is extremely confusing — even for someone like me who has some background on the current climate in India. 

But my biggest issues with the film were structural. At its core, Monkey Man is a revenge thriller as Kid avenges his mother’s death. But where it falters is in the “why” of her death. Mid-way through the film, after a failed assassination attempt on the police officer Rana at the high-end club he’s connived his way into, Kid gets ready to take his second shot. In a classic training montage (soundtracked by legendary tabla player Zakir Hussein in a loving ode to Indian musical tradition), Kid works through his demons. We see flashes of his idyllic childhood that’s disrupted when corporate interests move into the village and forcefully drive out the resisting residents. An extended sequence, far too late in the film, takes us to the night of the violence, where corrupt Rana sets fire to the village and then kills Kid’s mom with his bare hands.

But who are these corporate overlords moving into town? Why is Rana implicated with them? What is their religious ideology and their reason for burning down this village? The movie tries to haphazardly answer these questions, and focuses its attention in the wrong direction for much of its runtime. Rana is a crony, not the mastermind, we find out, and we only get flashes of the true villain — a right-wing nationalist named Baba Shakti (which literally translates to “Father Power”) who preaches to frenzied mobs. But his introduction comes too late in the film to pack the punch Patel is looking for. Baba Shakti is likely a stand-in for Narendra Modi, India’s current Hindu-nationalist prime minister (and the probable reason that Netflix dropped the project), but the flashes of Baba Shakti’s ominous string-pulling don’t effectively set him up as the Big Bad. The misdirection and lack of momentum around his reveal makes the final scenes, where Kid finally threads the needle and kills Rana and then barely takes out Baba Shakti, fall flat. 

There are still things to love in Monkey Man: The action is propulsive, and Patel’s co-written script cheekily name-checks its spiritually similar counterpart in John Wick. (You may have heard a few people talk about a particularly fun scene in which Kid holds a knife in his mouth to execute a kill, and those scenes are where the film is at its best.) During the slow second act, Patel showcases India’s hijras (a eunuch, third gender group prevalent in South Asia whose closest Western comp is the female trans community) and builds them up as allies and underdogs, teaming up with Kid to take down the evil forces in the film. It humanizes the group, a welcome depiction of a class of people who are constantly undermined. 

The film has gone through its own reinvention numerous times — as it moved from Netflix to Universal, producer Jordan Peele came onboard and allegedly helped cull and streamline the footage — and it’s obvious that some crucial character beats and motivational plot points were deleted. Even leaving the thematic issues aside, there are many indications that the long, tortured production hindered the film’s script: for one, Made in Heaven’s Sobhita Dhulipala’s Sita has absolutely nothing to do but look beautiful and be a damsel in distress in her very limited screen time, despite her namesake from the Ramayana being viewed as a warrior in modern, feminist retellings of the epic. 

I went into Monkey Man hoping to love a film that is clearly interested in fraught topics related to religious extremism and showcasing Hinduism in an approachable way. It is an audaciously ambitious film with its heart in the right place, but unfortunately the storytelling is too muddled to really strike on its desired message. 

Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Paste Magazine, Teen Vogue, Vulture and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.