I MAY DESTROY ME
DEV PATEL’S MONKEY MAN (2024)
Actor Dev Patel takes his seat at the high table of action with his directorial debut, Monkey Man (2024).
Grab your taekwondo training manual, an unusually generous vial of coke and brush up on your Hindi – there’s a new director in town. Well, in the ring. Or, on the floor of a flooding restroom. Or in the center of the screen in a debut that arrives with the force of a barbed-wire-strung steel bat to the head.
Our sweet slumdog, Dev Patel, the actor who started his career at 16, is now a director at 33 with his unhinged, slapstick action feature, Monkey Man (2024).
India, birthplace of four major religions and home to nearly 800 languages (the most of any country), is a haven of kaleidoscopically colorful and diverse mythology, including the millions of gods that belong to Hinduism. One story goes that a boy born with a monkey face (after his mother, a celestial nymph) named Hanuman reached up to the sun, thinking it was a mango. The gods retaliate, striking and breaking his jaw with a thunderbolt and crushing his claim to flame. This also endows him with special powers, which he uses in the devotion of Prince Rama, who seeks to rescue his wife Sita from a demon named Ravana. Straightforward enough.
Patel’s version of the story casts himself as a mostly nameless protagonist in a brutal world (loosely called “Kid”), a fighter in a rag tag group led by a scheming ringleader named Tiger, brought to life with the wonderful South African snarl of Sharlto Copley, whose transformation we can’t forget from District 9 (2009), nor his terrorizing from Elysium (2013). He runs a frazzled fight club trying to generate as much gambling income as possible from a bloodthirsty crowd. Wearing an expectedly unsettling monkey mask, Patel’s Kid takes nightly beatings for sad sums – but the man has plans. He soon begins work on the lowest rung of the ladder at a VIP club called Kings, run by a menacing but hilarious underground empress named Queenie, played with both bite and charm by the very entertaining Ashwini Kalsekar. The primary cast is rounded out with Alphonso, the charming hustler who works at the club (played by a longtime actor new to Hollywood named Pitobash); the Sita stand-in from the myth, Neela, a high end call girl, played by Bollywood’s Adithi Kalkunte; and the corrupt chief of police, Rana, played with a classic villainous sneer by Sikander Kherm, who considers Neela both pleasure and property.
This film is a feast for the senses. In the first five minutes, you can see, hear, taste, feel and even smell the grime, grit and gore. This is not The Matrix (1999), with its silky streetscapes and leather formalwear. This is dirt on the ground, dust in the air, blood in the mouth (and on the floor and the mirrors) kind of stuff. The foley team must have had a ball, creating an encyclopedic range of crunches, cuts, scrapes and screams. But for all the buzz about the visceral bloodbath Monkey Man is, I never felt the urge to hurl. Perhaps Scorsese, Cameron and Cronenberg have raised us Gen-Xers to have strong stomachs. Patel gives us gore and sleaze, but stops short of grossing us out.
Using what little cash Kid has from thug slugging, he devises a clever scheme to gain access to the club, meet Queenie, and convince her to give him a job scrubbing toilets. “Give me the job no one else wants,” he says. He enlists Alphonso to help him, and when he asks Kid what he really wants, he responds in a way that symbolizes what Patel is doing here: “I want a promotion.”
This is both our beloved actor and the film’s protagonist announcing his climb. It is also the first of a wave of winks to the audience. When sourcing a gun, a street seller compares his wares to those of “John Wick.” In another crafty set piece, also set in the street, a man calls a little boy “Lion” (a nod to Patel’s moving turn in the title role of Lion from 2016). During a training scene, as he fully graduates from his Slumdog baby face into full early thirties thirst trap, a group of bystanders coo and gasp, to which he returns his toothy grin, letting us know that he’s in on every joke, and while he does have a 12 pack, he’s not too proud to laugh at himself.
Which becomes one of the cornerstones of the film: Patel works overtime to make sure he knows that we know that he knows he isn’t taking himself, his performance or his debut too seriously. These winks and nods become so prevalent, I started to wonder what the film might have looked like if he hadn’t taken so seriously the act of not taking it so seriously. If he continues directing, and sheds his spots, we might be in store for a true, great global filmmaker. I thought, what might a modern drama, or a historical epic might look like from him once he gets comfortable in the seat at the table he has taken humbly but with a lot – a lot of moxie.
And that;s another thing this movie is: a lot. When two or three shots, cuts, needle drops, punches, moves and shakes would be enough – it uses ten. Because of its more modest budget – an impressively scant $10 million – Patel and his team got scrappy, using Go Pros and iPhones for some filming. The editing is insane, never lingering on a single shot more than a few seconds. There are three editors credited, which may be one reason, and could explain the occasional and abrupt shift in style and tone. We are constantly brought back to his childhood trauma featuring his mother, and these flashbacks eventually become jarring and tiresome.
But style there is yet, a decidedly laden, moist and brutal style, without the cool cleanness of the new Road House (2024) or the post-industrial blues and grays of Fight Club (1999). This is maximalist mayhem, not a black and white ballet like Scorsese showed us in Raging Bull (1980). The classic that comes to mind is William Friedken’s masterpiece, Sorcerer (1977), about four strangers fleeing troubled pasts and set on a mission of death in South America. You have never seen the jungle like this, a descending hellscape of rain, mud, flooding and despair. Patel is clean and dry for about five minutes, and then spends the rest of the story in various states of filth and injury (Patel suffered broken toes, a broken hand, a torn shoulder and an eye infection during shooting).
If you’re looking for the music to provide some balance to this melée, don’t bother. The music supervisors must have had a field day (not to mention a healthy budget), cramming the soundtrack with Marilyn Manson, Jay-Z, M.I.A., Skrillex, Kordhell, KIIXSHI, and a dozen others. The pounding tracks cover pop, rock, rap, R&B, dance, electronica, punk and other genres you might miss as you get buried by the cavalcade of needle drops from the film’s start to finish.
But composer Jed Kurzell helps thread this sonic needle, providing lower key, throbbing ambience to the score. And we can hear him using one of the hallmarks of contemporary action and science fiction scores, when horns and synths swell and warp downwards or upwards, giving a metallic dread to the proceedings, recognizable in sagas like Blade Runner 2049, Dune (2021) (both Hans Zimmer) and Oppenheimer (2023) (Ludwig Görannson). And we are treated to a blend of Hindustani and other traditional Indian beats, sounds and sizzles as well.
Kid takes us on this intentionally wild ride, through basements, kitchens, elevators, lounges and temples, kicking and punching and biting his way through a barrage of foes. You can feel the elbow grease, from all departments, as Patel conducts like a composer gone mad. But it somehow works, and one key to this success is the production design and art direction. This is a fully realized world, and layered, giving every scene depth and texture, making the camera’s job easier, and pushing the story forward. Production Designer Pawas Sawatchaiyamet and Art Director are as fueled and fired up as the DPs and editors, stuffing sets full of dressing, props and ephemera, but what pulls it off is purposeful inclusion. Anything and everything is used as a weapon. A shoe lying around? Perfect for a head smash. Artful cuisine on a plate? Ideal for a tiny piece of character development. This feels like a real environment, not a standard Hollywood production.
Costume designers Divvya Gambhir and Nidhi Gambhir show up to this task, scene after brutal or beautiful scene, featuring tuxedos, evening gowns, street rags, traditional indian dress, loincloths, and of course a withered monkey mask. And, in one of the story’s more poignant sub-plots, Kid takes refuge at an abandoned temple, where a local community leader cares for a group of trans women. With so many signs of tokenism in popular culture, this could easily be dismissed as “woke bait.” But not so – “hijra” is a Hindustani word that means people who identify as a “third gender,” a sophisticated interpretation of gender and sexuality (i.e. Native American’s coining of bisexuality as “twin spirit”). This plot point has a basis in cultural reality, and honors that culture with both reverence and fun.
Given Patel’s many dramatic performances, one might have thought his trajectory could veer toward Shakespeare, or other serious works of drama. The plaintiveness of his face; the pleading of his eyes. The fervor with which he approaches his acting work. Which is why Monkey Man is such a delight, with its schtick, comedy and big swings. Patel has said he wanted to enrich the action genre with “real trauma, real pain,” and that he drew inspiration from the storied films of Shah Rukh Khan (or “King Khan” as he’s known in Bollywood), a major star in India. The dialogue is decidedly not the Bard, with old chestnuts like “Sometimes you have to destroy in order to create,” which we’ve heard in many stories and scripts. Patel shrewdly keeps Kid’s dialogue at a minimum, a solid trick in many modern action directors’ bags, joining characters like Mad Max: Fury Road, John Wick, and the hero of Drive).
Could Patel’s debut have been less frenetic with a steadier hand? Sure. Would the photography have benefited from a more seasoned veteran who knows when to let our eyes breathe? Totally. Could the editing and music cues have been less seizure inducing? All signs point to yes. The dialogue is flat, and often cheesy. The villain is from central casting. The damsel isn’t given enough to do.
But for a lifelong actor’s first time in the director’s chair, he has shown us that in general, he knows what he’s doing; knows how to assemble a team of professionals willing to push a genre forward; and knows when to relax the serious face and fist, and pick up the glittered platform heel. He’s got plenty of time to get serious if he wants to be. So he started by monkeying around. So what. He deserved his promotion.