[COLUMN] Monkey Man Begins as a Revenge Thriller, and Evolves Into Something More Interesting | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Monkey Man. If you haven’t seen it - and you should, it’s great! - feel free to bookmark and come back. It’s worth seeing knowing as little as possible.

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man hits the ground running.

From the outset, the movie clues the audience in on what to expect. The protagonist, Kid (Patel), is introduced running an elaborate con to infiltrate an exclusive private club called “Kings.” He hustles his way into the trust of proprietor and pimp Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar), hoping to get close to local police officer Rana (Sikandar Kher) to exact bloody revenge. The  film understands the space in which it is operating. When Kid visits a local gun salesman, the dealer asks, “You like John Wick?”

Monkey Man takes a little while to bring the audience fully up to speed on Kid’s motivations. Eventually, it is revealed that Rana murdered Kid’s mother (Adithi Kalkunte) while clearing land for a development overseen by powerful local religious and cultural leader Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande). However, the early scenes of Monkey Man provide enough quick flashes that the audience can grasp the basics from context: Kid wants revenge against Rana for killing his mother.

Part of this is simply down to Patel’s narrative efficiency. As director and co-writer, Patel clearly knows how to deliver the necessary information to the audience and let them fill in the gaps on their own time. However, that is only possible because of the audience’s familiarity with this particular genre. The audience intuitively understands the space in which Monkey Man is operating, and so can piece together the basic plot based on the snippets provided.

This is clearly a revenge movie, so Kid has to be avenging something. He is clearly fixated on Rana, so the audience understands that Rana is the villain. The movie returns time and again to flashbacks of Kid’s mother, who is entirely absent from the present-day plot, and so that seems like a logical motivation. Patel provides lots of smaller details along the way – the burns on Kid’s hands that he claims are due to bleach for example – that add clarity to the basic details.

This makes a certain amount of sense. After all, the “revenge plot” is one of the most archetypal action movie templates. The hero has lost something, and thus is justified in enacting a horrible revenge upon the people responsible, allowing both the character and the audience a sense of catharsis. These movies are cheap to make and are so simple in their structure that it’s possible to turn them into a series of mad-libs.

In Taken, the bad guys kidnap Kimberly (Maggie Grace), the daughter of Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), so Bryan murders his way through wave after wave of anonymous goons. Neeson has turned this subgenre into a reliable cash cow, to the point that a movie like Cold Pursuit almost feels like a piece of self-parody. John Wick infamously turns revenge plotting into a fine art, as John (Keanu Reeves) sets out to avenge the murder of the dog gifted to him by his dying wife (Bridget Moynahan).

It is easy to understand personal revenge as motivation in an action movie, but it is also somewhat limiting. It narrows the perspective to that of a single character, stripping out any larger context or meaning. Robert E. Watkins contends that this rugged individualism appeals to audiences precisely “because it is a fantasy of decontextualization and depoliticizing.” Academic Wendy Brown argues that this cultural focus on “individual heroism and failure, is also relentlessly depoliticizing.”

Part of what is so interesting about Monkey Man is that it effectively joins that plot at the third act. It assumes that the audience understands the rhythms of the revenge plot well enough that the actual set-up is incidental. By the time the movie has started, Kid already knows exactly what he is planning to do and has a clear idea of how he is going to accomplish it. In the film’s opening stretch, there is far less time spent on why Kid is doing what he is doing and more energy invested in how he does it.

Monkey Man follows this idea to its logical conclusion. What would be the climax of a movie like John Wick is really just the end of the first act. Kid manages to smuggle a gun into Kings. He gains access to the higher levels of the club, putting him in close proximity to Rana. By manipulating fellow employee Alfonso (Pitobash), he is able to taint some cocaine that sends Rana into the bathroom, where Kid can ambush him with the gun and finally have his revenge.

That is where most revenge movies would end, but one of the smarter choices in Monkey Man is that this is really where the movie begins. Kid’s assassination attempt goes spectacularly wrong. He misses his moment. He engages in a knock-down brawl with Rana, and gets soundly defeated. Kid just about manages to escape the club, but flees into the city where he finds himself pursued by the local police force. He barely survives, ending up washed away in the river.

Then the movie starts over. It’s quite impressive. Patel’s direction settles down a little bit. It’s only once this opening stretch is over that the audience realizes how intense the direction had been. Patel shoots that first act like it’s the climax of a Paul Greengrass, Doug Liman or Gareth Evans film. Kid is pulled from the water by a small community of hijra, India’s “third gender.” Led by Alpha (Vipin Sharma), this community of outcasts provides Kid with shelter and protection.

This provides Kid with an opportunity to heal, both physically and mentally. The film’s frantic pace slows down. The quick snippets of Kid’s traumatic backstory are allowed room to breathe. The audience – and perhaps even Kid himself – is allowed space to fully understand the particulars of what happened. Rana’s murder of Kid’s mother wasn’t a single act. Instead, it existed in a larger context of corruption and exploitation. Kid’s trauma is just one expression of a much larger wound.

Monkey Man demonstrates a lot of cultural specificity. Patel claims the movie is rooted in memories of his grandfather “telling [him] these stories of Indian mythology.” The hijra are a uniquely Indian concept rarely seen in western film. Speaking at the film’s premiere, Patel stated that he wanted Monkey Man to address “what’s going on in India.” Given that the climax builds to an election night coinciding with the end of Diwali, it’s very difficult not to read political subtext into the movie.

In early trailers, Baba Shakti’s sect waved orange banners, evoking the colors of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata Party, also known as “the saffron party.” In the film itself, the color scheme has been shifted to red. Monkey Man was originally intended for Netflix,  but the streaming service decided that it was “dead in the water” before Jordan Peele saw an early cut and convinced Universal to buy it from Netflix for theatrical distribution.

Patel is understandably reluctant to comment on the particulars of what happened with Netflix, claiming that he is unsure of the streaming service’s internal logic. “They have a mandate, and they have to do what’s right for them,” Patel stated when asked about the banners in the film. “They felt that, you know…” He paused, before clarifying, “I don’t know why they passed on the film.” However, given Netflix’s past capitulation to Modi’s government, it’s hard to believe politics weren’t an issue.

In this second act, Monkey Man shifts away from the familiar and ruggedly individualistic revenge thriller mode, becoming something much more complex. Kid is an angry young man, channeling his frustration at a system that failed him into grim attempts at self-actualization. Focusing on Rana, he misses the larger picture. Of course, Rana is literally and directly responsible for his mother’s death. However, the events that led to that death are rooted in something much deeper.

Patel has spoken about how he didn’t want Monkey Man to feel cheap and disposable in a way that a lot of modern action movies do. “The action genre has been abused by the system,” he stated at the premiere at South by Southwest. “You know, a quick buck. Mindless shit. I wanted to give it soul. Real trauma. Real pain. You guys deserve that. I wanted to infuse it with a little bit of culture.” There is a sense that Monkey Man is genuinely important to Patel.

Monkey Man is not a particularly subtle movie, but it doesn’t have to be. As director and co-writer, Patel is very fond of his visual motifs. Monkey Man is a story about class and structure. The nightclub and brothel that Rana frequents is literally called “Kings”, decorated with portraits of emperors and maharajas. Even within this exclusive club, there is a rigid hierarchy. The higher the floor, the more exclusive the party. It’s populated by prime ministers, spiritual leaders and police chiefs.

This image is contrasted with another tall structure: that of a tree. Recovering with the hijra and remembering time with his mother, Kid learns that a tree is strongest at its roots. In another nice touch of visual storytelling, shoes are repeatedly weaponized. The film’s visual language is one of action from the ground-up. At the climax, the hijra join Kid in storming Kings. Kid avenges himself on Rana, but he realizes that Baba Shakti represents a more profound sickness gripping the country.

Kid learns that he is stronger as part of a community fighting together than he ever will be pursuing his own satisfaction. “He’s a lonely character who finds warmth, laughter, and philosophy with this community that’s been brushed off to the side,” Patel explained. “He learns to recalibrate his trauma.” In some ways, this feels like a companion piece to the late John Wick movies, which often explore how the structures of modern living make it impossible to escape a broken system.

Monkey Man is obviously set in India, and is firmly rooted in that country’s culture and politics. However, the film’s themes and ideas are universal. The persecution and oppression experienced by the hijra resonates in an era where transgender rights are constantly under threat. In the western world, inequality is only increasing, democratic norms are under threat, and there is an increasing need for collective action to fight these very real problems.

Monkey Man begins as a familiar riff on the classic revenge action movie, the story of a lonely hero out to avenge a personal wrong. In doing so, it demonstrates how familiar that template has become, how easily the audience can follow along with the basic structure of such a narrative. However, Monkey Man then becomes something much more interesting and compelling. It becomes a story of what happens when personal revenge gives way to empathy and solidarity.