Reviews
‘Monkey Man’ SXSW Review – Myth and Ultra-Violence Collide in Dev Patel’s Bloody Actioner
Dev Patel (The Green Knight, Slumdog Millionaire) has much more on his mind than straightforward action homage with his high-octane directorial feature debut, Monkey Man. At the SXSW world premiere, Patel told the enrapt audience that he poured his soul into his hyper-violent actioner, and broke two toes, a hand, tore a shoulder, and battled an eye infection along with all the blood, sweat, and tears getting the film made. The effort shows in every frame.
While the violence onscreen is palpable and painful, it’s not the exquisite fight choreography and thrilling action set pieces that set Monkey Man apart but also its political consciousness, unique narrative structure, and myth-making scale.
Patel, who also produces and co-wrote the screenplay with John Collee and Paul Angunawela, stars as Kid. Inspired by the legend of Hanuman, told to him by his mother as a child, Kid earns money at an underground fight club by throwing fights and taking punches while donning a monkey mask. The anonymity allows him to save up cash for an elaborate revenge scheme to infiltrate the city’s corrupt elite and settle up with the man who took everything from him.
While Monkey Man pays tribute to all of the action genre’s greats, from the Indonesian action classics to Korean revenge cinema and even a John Wick joke or two, Dev Patel’s cultural spin and unique narrative structure leave behind all influences in the dust for new terrain. Vengeance may serve as Kid’s only focus and aim, but he’s a far cry from the invincible hero type that frequently dominates the action. Kid is the epitome of an underdog, one more likely to fumble through a fight and come away battered and bleeding. His plans, though intricate and clever, derail often and spiral out of control to great, bloody effect.
It’s in those failures that Patel brings endless pathos, worldbuilding, and effortless style. His hero gets knocked down, only to miraculously pick himself back up again and again through sheer force of will. Like Hanuman. That winds up attracting a variety of unexpected allies, including vivacious street hustler Alphonso (Pitobash), mysterious and alluring sex worker Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala), and the pivotal Alpha (Vipin Charmin), the spiritual mother of the mystical third-gender tribe knows as the hijra.
Monkey Man is epic in scale. Patel packs the two-hour runtime with an endless barrage of set pieces and kinetic action sequences, all while employing a variety of techniques that maintain a propulsive, intense pace. A variety of techniques and camera tricks are utilized here. Cinematographer Sharone Meir masterfully immerses viewers in the stunning landscapes of rural India and bustling Mumbai city streets. When it comes to the action, Meir frequently puts viewers in Kid’s shoes, with the camera switching to first person perspective to plunge audiences into the high-octane insanity. The violence hits hard, especially as Kid finds inventive, excruciating, and frequently shocking ways to gain the upper hand.
Dev Patel in MONKEY MAN, directed by Dev Patel
Kid’s targets, corrupt police chief Rana (Sikandar Kher) and sociopathic guru Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), further expand Monkey Man beyond a straightforward revenge actioner. Through their villainy, Patel taps into a variety of heady, complex themes and commentary that target government corruption, the oppressive caste system, and even religion. Not all of it neatly fits into an already packed feature or is explored fully, but Patel prevents it from spiraling out of his grasp through confident filmmaking and style.
Monkey Man presents Dev Patel as a new action hero, a tenacious underdog with a penetrating stare who bites, bludgeons, and stabs his way through bodies to gloriously bloody excess. More excitingly, the film introduces Patel as a strong visionary right out of the gate. There’s a profound sense of cultural identity and personality that pervades every facet of this brutal brawler, one that never forgets that character work and story are just as important to ensure the action has an impact. Boy, does the action have an immense impact here. While the film’s complex ideas threaten to overwhelm Kid’s quest for bare-knuckle brutality, Patel’s assured, audacious vision delivers an epic crowd-pleaser of mythic proportions. Run, don’t walk, to theaters for this one.
Monkey Man made its world premiere at SXSW and will release in theaters on April 5, 2024.
Chuck Tingle‘s writing is embedded with a particular tonal trick that makes him perfectly suited to horror. “Propulsive” is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Tingle’s energetic prose, and when his books start wrapping themselves around characters and digging through their various complexities, it’s easy to be pulled along, absorbed in the feeling that an old friend is simply telling you a story.
Then Tingle will drop one of the single creepiest bits of imagery you’ve ever read, and you’re right back in the horror space. It’s not always a jump scare, but it is always a pulsing feeling of dread that keeps you hooked through the rest of the book.
Fabulous Bodies, Tingle’s latest horror novel, carries on these gifts, and the promise Tingle showed on books like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays. His fiction’s growing ever more confident and precise, and his eye for horrific detail hasn’t dimmed in the least, making this a summer reading delight for horror fans.
Poppy is a single mother determined to make a better life for her daughter, particularly after growing up in group homes and foster systems. By day, she works hard to keep up the flow of upbeat, enthusiastic content as a fashion influencer, and while that’s going well, it’s not yet making ends meet. To make up the difference, she moonlights as a grave robber, lifting bodies from morgues and funeral homes and selling their pieces on the black market. It’s grueling, dangerous work, and it’s about to pay off big. Out of the blue, Poppy gets a call to transport the newly dead body of her musical hero, the legendary Eddie Michaels. It’s a weird gig, but the payout is big enough that she could walk away from her macabre side gig forever. Poppy takes the job, and things get complicated when Eddie turns out to be, well, only mostly dead.
From the moment Eddie’s corpse enters the picture, Fabulous Bodies takes on the vibe of a road novel, as the grave robber and the undead rock star make stop after stop, and Poppy tries again and again to wrap her mind about what she’s gotten herself into, and how she might get herself out. It’s a delightful premise, and Tingle never loses his grip on the fun of it. No matter how dark the novel gets, and it does get quite dark, the narrative keeps barreling forward, delivering macabre laughs and moments of beautifully gruesome invention along the way.
Because he’s set his protagonist up as a fashion influencer, Tingle has lots of room to play in the space of how we view human bodies, both alive and dead, how we use them, and what we value in them. This is the emotional core of Fabulous Bodies, and while it’s sometimes overshadowed by the runaway train of the plot, it remains a potent source of thematic exploration throughout the book, and it gets more complicated when you consider certain gifts Eddie’s been granted in his strange supernatural state.
In essence, we’re looking at a story about a grave robber who discovers a body that not only fights back, but takes control of any given situation. That throws Poppy for repeated loops and keeps the plot moving, but it also makes us consider on a deeper level exactly what we value about our own physical form, and what might happen when we lose our grip on it entirely.
The book’s themes and emotional concerns hum through the whole narrative, but the overwhelming impression I got while reading Fabulous Bodies was just how much damn fun this book is. I couldn’t stop reading it, not just because it’s so filled with sudden swerves and ghoulish setpieces, but because Tingle has honed his horror storytelling down to a fine, very sharp point. Fabulous Bodies moves like a roller coaster, complete with a tension-filled ramp-up and a finale that’ll leave you breathless by the time the ride is over.
If you haven’t been reading Chuck Tingle’s horror work up to this point, it’s time to get on board, because he’s just getting started, and he’s already mastered the art of the scary page-turner.
Fabulous Bodies is available now.
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