Review of Monkey Man, directed by Dev Patel

My shameful confession before jumping into this is the following: before watching Monkey Man, I had never seen anything with Dev Patel in it before. Heck, if I didn’t have an AMC subscription and technically saw this movie for free, as I’ve seen so many movies AMC basically is in the red when it comes to me, I probably wouldn’t have seen this movie either despite the hype. I’ve been spoiled by not really paying much for movies.

It was the massive online hype that got me to check out the trailer for this movie. I was sold immediately when I realized it was going to be like a Park Chan-wook movie from the early 2000s, except with a very Desi and bilingual context. The Desi context is what really pushed me over the edge.

So I saw the movie with my sister, and didn’t tell her what it was about. After the fact, she told me to never take her to a movie like this again, as she did not realize it was violent. I was cackling personally at the violence.

And ironically, this was one of the last movie theater movies that I saw before packing up my bags and relocating to South Korea and India for the next 14 months. What a great start to learning more about India beyond the cheesy Bollywood movies.

Onwards with the review!

As Monkey Man, a young Indian man sets out against corrupt officials in a large city.

We begin this story in the past. Throughout the course of the movie, this narrative is told to us in flashbacks, but I’m including it in chronological order for the sake of my sanity. Our main character is Kid, who, in the past, is a little boy living in an Indian village. They live in the forest, and he wanders with his mother, who tells him the stories of the Indian mythological figure Hanuman.

Hanuman is a monkey that, when he was naive and foolish, reached for the sun thinking that it was a piece of fruit to eat. He was punished by the Gods for this act. This mythological framework becomes a heavy handed metaphor throughout the course of the film, especially as Kid takes on the Monkey mask later on.

But in the village, a nearby spiritual guru wants to acquire the land for himself and rid the village of its inhabitants. He sends a corrupt police chief, Rana Singh, to try and get everyone off of the land. Instead, everyone is killed, but Kid is hidden by his mother. He watches through the floorboards as Rana Singh kills her then burns the body.

Kid ran downstairs to try and save her, but ended up with scarred hands instead. He grows up and lives in the city of Yatana as an adult. He works as a masked fighter, in the monkey mask, at a boxing club. The owner, a white man, basically has him there to lose, but Kid has other plans. He’s getting revenge.

The spiritual guru, Baba, is now a major politician in the city, and he knows the police chief goes to a certain brothel often. Kid lands a job as a cleaning boy at the brothel’s kitchen, and he takes notes on what’s going on there. He also becomes buddies with the gangster Alphonso, who he tells about the boxing club.

He fixes a match so Alphonso wins a ton of money. He allows Kid onto the VIP floor because of this, and Kid plots out a new plan. He trains a stray dog, then acquires a gun. With the stray dog’s help, he gets the gun inside the VIP floor, corners Rana Singh in the bathroom, and fails to kill him.

Forced to flee, Alphonso helps Kid on the way out, but the two end up stopped by police after a major chase. Alphonso goes into hiding, but Kid is shot by the cops and lands in the river. However, he’s saved by Alpha, the head of a hijra temple community that’s under threat by Baba’s people.

The hijra hide him there, as Kid is now a wanted man. Alpha teaches him to confront the trauma of his mother’s death, and Kid begins training in the temple. When everyone at the temple is threatened with eviction, he returns to the boxing club, wins a ton of money, and then saves the temple.

The next plan is during Diwali, as Baba enacts his final stages of the campaign. His candidate wins, but Kid, with his monkey mask, breaks into the celebration and starts killing people. Alpha and her people join him, taking everyone down, as well as the prostitute Kid befriended at the beginning of the movie. I’m pretty there was a direct implication between her and Alpha’s people, but not confirmed.

Queenie, who runs the brothel, tries to take down Kid, but the prostitute kills him instead. Kid severs the dead woman’s thumb to get to the penthouse, where he beats Rana to death. He then finds Baba in a room with a shallow pool.

Baba injures him deeply with some hidden blades, but Kid takes down Baba after a small fight. Kid then collapses on the floor, covered in blood, thinking about his mother and Hanuman.

Overall Thoughts

The ending is kind of open on whether he died or not, but I presumed he did considering the Hanuman motifs. Hanuman led people into battle and tore open his own chest, and become immortal because of that. Maybe Kid is immortalized through death, or he survived.

Regardless, I had a lot of fun in this movie. Like I said, it reminded me of 2000s Korean cinema, especially Park’s work, which is right up my alley. I watch way too many Korean movies.

But how mythology and culture is so deeply packed into this movie is fascinating to me. I think this is going to be something people study one day, especially when it comes to the motifs and symbolism. Dev Patel better get acknowledgement for this someday!

Go watch this one if you have not already.

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