"Monkey Man" Review: Dev Patel's 'Scrappy' Filmmaking is a Double-Edged Sword
Stories of what went on behind the scenes of Monkey Man are endless. From Dev Patel breaking body parts to breaking cameras. The fact that this film even got made is a crowning achievement of resilience. When you watch Monkey Man, the chaotic energy of what it must have been like to make this, radiates off the screen. It creates a scrappy filmmaking style, not necessarily a bad thing. At times it lends itself as an excellent tool, but at others it creates a film that feels half-baked.
There is no doubt that Monkey Man is an impressive directorial debut. Dev Patel shoots the action with an excellent level of immersion. There are two main fight sequences in the film. The first is where his scrappy filmmaking really works. You can feel the urgency of every shot, as though Dev Patel only had a couple of minutes to shoot everything. Through this, all sense of time or spatial awareness disappears. You get thrown back and forth between punches and kicks. It pulls you right into the chaos of the fight.
The second fight sequence takes place when we see the protagonist as a much more trained fighter. This is shot in a more controlled manner. The camera is rhythmic, with much sharper moves, the focus is controlled and the edit is cleaner. It’s a clever visual device that Patel uses to show his character’s progression as a fighter.
In this sense, Monkey Man succeeds as an American action film. The action is just as good as John Wick or Mission Impossible, but Dev Patel has been quite emphatic about the Asian influences on his film. Unfortunately, compared to the material that inspired this, Monkey Man comes off as a somewhat cheap copy. None of the actors have the performing talents and charisma that someone like Bruce Lee had. It’s not nearly as weird and violent as some of his Korean inspirations. Compared to Oldboy, for example, this is like a children’s cartoon. You can see that this film was conceived with these inspirations in mind, but never does Monkey Man reach even close to the brilliance that these films achieved.
Even looking past the action, Monkey Man doesn’t bring anything special. And yes, you don’t watch an action film for an exceptional plot, but in this case, there is very little action. Like I said, there are only two big action sequences. One towards the middle and one in the end. The rest of the film is just character work and exposition. It would be reasonable then, to hope for an interesting story and characters, but there are none of that. Kid, the protagonist, is an incredibly forgettable character. We know very little about him, apart from his backstory which borders upon cliche. There is nothing remotely remarkable about him. Even the villain is a complete mystery. Not until the very end of the film do we see him in person. Until this point it’s only ever through news coverage. Perhaps this is used to show things through Kid’s point of view, but all it does is make him feel less of a threat. We don’t know who he is other than that his politics disagree with that of our protagonist’s. It makes it very hard to care about anything that’s going on if both our villain and hero are mediocre.
As much as Dev Patel’s scrappy filmmaking serves the action sequences, it plagues the story. Monkey Man’s messy and chaotic style prevents it from focusing in on any one element. Everything feels rushed and distracted, resulting in characters that aren’t properly fleshed out. So while the action may look cool, the story is dulled down by the lacklustre characters. Perhaps if this film doubled its action and halved the character building and backstory, I would have been more amazed. However with such an uninspired script, it’s hard to look at Monkey Man as anything other than a, no doubt impressive, but unimaginative directorial debut.
