These are jumbled first impressions. I saw the movie without knowing much about it going in.
The spoiler light description of the movie is that it is a revenge story that is wrapped up with social commentary.
The commentary is not particularly original or subtle. The rich and powerful people are a bunch of manipulative, hypocritical douchebags who don’t care about the masses. The fact that the message isn’t subtle isn’t a criticism, merely an observation. Sometimes heavy commentary in a movie can become a burden the causes the logic of the plot to collapse, but in this case the message is tied directly with the main character, so that aspect pretty smoothly integrates in.
The main character, who is essentially unnamed, is played by Dev Patel who is also the director and a writer for the movie. He does great. He’s got the physicality and the facial acting to sell the character.
I really enjoyed watching Sikandar Kher, who plays a corrupt cop. He has an amazing face for a villain. His chin isn’t quite Robert Z’Dar tier, but it does some serious heavy lifting.
I was sadly let down by a lot of the action scenes. The actors themselves seemed talented, but the camera was far too spastic. While I’m sure it was trying to be immersive and capture a feeling of frantic chaos, I found myself pulled out and annoyed quite often.
Even in scenes of tension between the action the camera often felt uncomfortable lingering on any particular shot for too long. I really wanted it to hold sometimes, as the movie occasionally had some very artistic frames, but they never got any time to breathe.
I would rate this as the kind of movie that didn’t blow me away, but for a directorial debut it’s pretty strong, and if Patel makes more movies I am signed up to see them and hope he builds on experience from this one.
There are a lot of references to Indian politics. The villain is hinted quite unsubtley to be the Indian Prime Minister. Agree about the Jason Bourne style jump cuts in the actions scenes.
I’d been quite excited for it due to Mark Kermode giving it a rave review on his podcast but seems like he’s becoming more generous as a reviewer the older he gets.
I don’t think it’s even hinted, but a direct part of the plot that the spiritual guru is supporting the candidate for Prime Minister as a way to be a power behind the throne.
The conspiracy that goes all the way to the top was fitting for the theme on its own, as well as making me think of (neo)noir like Chinatown.
I did think it was interesting that after Monkey Man killed the corrupt cop, the Prime Minister was cowering in the room and Monkey Man ignored him. That guy seemed almost like run of the mill scumbag in the orbit of the guru, and not worth bothering with compared to the guru.
That makes sense! I was thinking that the movie was suggesting the guru was analogous to the literal Indian PM, Narendra Modi, who is a hindu nationalist.
Thank you, I’m looking forward to seeing it soon myself
My thoughts exactly - Dev Patel is a strong lead and did a decent job behind the camera. I also thought the Indian setting helped bring something new to the one-man-army sub-genre (especially the Shiva sub-plot that paid off nicely). However, the frenetic Jason Bourne-style action direction really harmed the film. Just have more confidence in your stunt coordinator and stand back a bit to let the action do the work. I can see that they were going for more… Impressionistic approach (they do the same in the Diwali scenes) but it just makes everything hard to follow. I did feel like they calmed this down a bit in later fights but it just wasn’t enough.
All that said, I’d be up for a Monkey Man 2 if they learned their lessons from this one. I’ll also be watching Dev Patel’s directing career with interest.
