‘Monkey Man’ is SO Much More Than the “Indian John Wick”
It’s packed with bone-cracking hand to hand combat, but Dev Patel’s directorial debut throbs with a political and spiritual power that might surprise you.
THIS JUST IN: the Slumdog Millionaire does NOT need to phone a friend to kick your ass into next Tuesday. Remember the loveable underdog in the hot seat in Danny Boyle’s 2008 crowd pleaser? Dev Patel was just 18 when he broke through in the film that went on to win the Best Picture Oscar. Now 34, he’s levelled up again — both as a tenacious filmmaker, and a bona fide action star.
First up. Why’s Monkey Man being compared to John Wick?
When the Monkey Man trailer dropped, Patel’s bulked-up, tuxedo-clad frame and brutal fight craft had pretty much the entire internet label his directing debut “John Wick Goes To India”. And sure, the parallels are there: both feature our hero in a sharp suit on a tear of remorseless vengeance, fuelled by grief and felling a bevy of goons and heavies.
The movie leans into the comparison for fun at times. Dev Patel’s got a beard. He’s even got a dog. And when his character goes to buy a handgun, the shop owner tries to sell him one that “looks just like John Wick’s.” Great moment — everyone’s thinking it, why not just come straight out and self-reference it?
Yet, while those visual nods exist, Monkey Man deserves to occupy its own lane. Patel includes strong themes of oppression and political corruption in its story which tap into the current day Indian social climate. There’s a core notion of spirituality that drives the plot. And the film respectfully represents the Hijra community, India’s “third-gender” group which includes transgender and intersex people.
What’s Monkey Man about?
“Kid” (Dev Patel) lives in a city of tin-shed slums, in the fictional Indian metropolis of Yatana. He fights for money — double, if he bleeds — wearing a monkey mask that protects his identity, but not his face from the blows, or his ears from a blood-lusty crowd yelling for his opponents to brutalise him. Kid’s on the lowest rung among millions like him. Oppressed by a massively divided class structure, he’s literally and figuratively beaten down.
He lies awake at night, among a sprawl of other sweaty bodies, reliving his Mum’s wistful childhood stories of the Hindu deity Hanuman — a revered God of strength, courage and self-discipline, often depicted as half-man, half-monkey. They aren’t Kid’s only memories, though. The heroic tales of Hanuman are mixed with flashbacks to his childhood trauma: his village raided and destroyed. His mother assaulted, then murdered.
“Hanuman really captivated me growing up… this super-strong being who could hold mountains in one hand, [but] when you go deep into it, he is sort of a guy who has lost faith in himself and had to be reminded of who he was.”
~ Dev Patel on the cultural inspiration for Monkey Man
Kid’s a shrewd hero. He quickly spies his “in” to climb the social order: a chance meeting that gets him grubby cleaning work (“give me the job no-one else wants to do, and I’ll do it”) in one of the city’s elite gentlemen’s clubs. It’s frequented by the type of high-rollers and men in power that you don’t want to cross: greedy execs, corrupt political figures… and Rana Singh, the chief of police. Kid recognises him immediately. It’s the man who took his mother’s life away in front of his young eyes.
How does Monkey Man examine class and corruption?
Kid’s goal is laser-focused: exact revenge on the powers that tore his community apart (in other words: kill spree. Pass the popcorn). As director though, Patel’s goal is broader. He quickly lays in visual reminders of India’s giant class divide: Kid’s disbelief at the luxury cars, watches and drug use in the inner sanctum of the high-class brothel, smashed against shots of cardboard flapping on the wet road as high-speed traffic whizzes past. The cardboard sheets are makeshift mattresses, used by kids sleeping on the street. “They don’t even see us,” Kid mutters. He straddles two worlds now, and they couldn’t be starker.
Flashbacks show us how Chief Rana Singh spearheaded the displacement of Kid’s village, burning it to the ground under the justification that it suddenly occupied “holy land”. Translation: the lowest classes are violently displaced by greed and corruption (yet again). In this story, that injustice fuels Kid’s rageful vendetta, but in real life, it’s a prism for India’s wider cultural upheaval: events that are happening at a much larger scale, like the ongoing farmer’s protests in New Delhi that have led to violent clashes and food shortages.
“I really wanted to touch on caste system in India, the idea where the poor are at the bottom, slaving away in these kitchens, then you go to the land of the kings and above them, you have God, a man-made god that is polluting and corrupting religion.”
~ Dev Patel on including India’s socio-political issues in Monkey Man
Patel isn’t shy about showing the political allegory. The entire film plays out against the backdrop of an upcoming election, and even includes quick flashes of real-life political protests stemming from worsening unrest between Hindus and Muslims. Just like the political powers in the film, it’s a divide that Indian PM Nerendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party has seemed unwilling to hose down, or in some cases actively stoked.
Patel also explicitly introduces the concept of corruption within religion, in the form of a revered guru, Baba Shakti. He spouts the right kind of spiritual epithets, but his alliance with Chief Rana says more. At one point, Shakti is interviewed about why he supports Rana Singh displacing farmers to build a factory. Shakti snake-oils an explanation, wrapped in the language of religious exemption: “It’s not a factory, it’s a commune. They’re not workers, they are my disciples.” In other words, these blind followers are happy (despite having their rights and livelihoods stripped away). Hot tip: when your guru lives in a penthouse and travels by luxury helicopter, all that ‘disciple’ chat is shady framing at best. For Hindu speakers, the clues were already there: the name “Shakti” literally means “power”.
How does Monkey Man touch on the gender-nonconforming community?
It’s worth pointing out that Monkey Man also has its moments of deep beauty. Patel’s flashbacks are lush and vivid, and they’re often juxtaposed with something from Kid’s present to land those emotional hits even harder: a dirty river morphs into a memory of visiting a beautiful clean stream as a child; a glimpse of his scarred adult hands flashes back to his soft, unmarked hands being held by his Mum.
This gentle energy bleeds through into perhaps the film’s most unexpected element: an arc devoted to Kid’s protection and enlightenment by a (very different) oppressed group. On the run for his life, half-beaten and nearly drowned, Kid is rescued and healed by a mysterious band of outsiders, who tell him “They won’t look for you here — they find us unsettling.”
If you’ve seen Monkey Man and were puzzled by these characters’ eclectic presentation, we can fill in the blanks. The group are Hijras — a third gender in Hindu society that, according to holy texts, have existed for more than two millennia. Often thought of as transgender by other cultures, Harvard explains that “Hijra identity is complex… Indian society and most hijras consider themselves to be neither male nor female. They are a different gender altogether.”
The hijra community isn’t small — it’s estimated around 3 million hijra people live in India today. But they are secretive, living together in groups isolated from wider society, where the younger hijras are initiated by elders into their spiritual roles. Their seclusion is borne out of safety: the British declared all hijras criminals in the latter half of the 19th century, and they are still widely treated with disdain, excluded from employment, and openly victimised. As one hijra character puts it, “We were warriors — but we were driven into exile here.”
“This film is an anthem for the underdog, the voiceless, the marginalised.”
~ Dev Patel, on including the hijra community in Monkey Man
It’s a powerful allegory when the hijra’s spiritual leader, Alpha (Vipin Sharma) rehabilitates Kid both in body and spirit, telling him “I was once like you — a slave to childhood terrors. Then I learned you need to destroy in order to grow. To create space for new life.” There’s an unspoken kinship conveyed here, between the intersex person and the lower-caste orphan: both characters share a knowledge of rejection and pain; both possess a deeper courage.
Kid rebuilding himself within the enclave of the hijras — finding his strength and accessing his vengeance — is an embodiment of one subjugated group supporting another to fight back and flatten their oppressors. It’s one of Monkey Man’s integral narrative themes, and on the fun side, it inspires a training montage to rival anything from Rocky.
So what’s the takeaway from Monkey Man?
Huge credit to Dev Patel: he grabbed a chance to bring a uniquely Indian story to the wider world, using the action genre as a Trojan horse to give us something deeper. And as producer, director and performer, he’s done it through sheer will, pulling the film together on less than USD$10 million (a shoestring by Hollywood standards) after Netflix dumped their deal, and it was rescued by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.
In terms of pure popcorn, Monkey Man pulses with energy. The pace is electric; the action moves fast and it’s incredibly visceral. You can almost feel Kid’s sweat hitting you from the boxing ring in the opening scenes. The later fights, as Kid infiltrates the upper echelons of the club are (literally) bone crunching stuff. Explosive. Savage. Remorseless. Gasp-inducing. Yes to all of the above. To put it bluntly, Dev Patel is not fucking around.
If that was all that Monkey Man offered, though, we wouldn’t be writing this guide (sorry, John Wick fans). Instead, this is a film you can enjoy on two levels simultaneously. Patel has built a satisfying, mainstream revenge flick — the perfect cinema experience — atop a story with deep respect for Indian mythology, the politically disenfranchised, and the culturally shunned.
The cherry on top? You can read it how you like. Does Kid’s powerlessness and rage tap into a wider, millennial frustration? The kind that millions (maybe billions) feel about, say, the global economy, or the deep division between the political left and right? Or could it be trading on a different sense, like the hopelessness we feel looking on our phones at the tragedy of Gaza, or the existential gutwrench of climate inaction?
No matter which of those angles hit hardest for you, they’re all valid takes. And they resonate with the sense that, like Kid, we’re the underdog; shut out of a world where only the most powerful (or wealthiest, or whitest, or straightest) wield the control. Monkey Man gloriously wrestles that control back, fighting its way out of the box that the voiceless are shoved into. In doing so, Dev Patel’s debut punches its way well clear of another box: one labelled “John Wick Goes To India.” Because it’s so much more than that.
Originally published at https://good.film.
