Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of Monkey Man. This movie came out at the beginning of April, and as things stand right now, it’s my second favorite movie to release this year so far. This movie follows a young man, named Kid, who ekes out a meager living in an underground fight club where, night after night, wearing a gorilla mask, he’s beaten bloody by popular fighters for cash. However, he finds a way to infiltrate the enclave of the city’s sinister elite. His mysteriously scarred hands then unleashed an explosive campaign of retribution to settle the score with the men who took everything away from him. The main selling point for a lot of people with this movie is the insane action sequences. That is one of the best parts of the movie for sure, but for me, the story and deep dive into Indian culture was the most interesting part to me. This movie really went into the corrupt Indian police system and I was a massive fan of that. This is just a massive revenge story at heart, and it’s one of the best-done ones I’ve ever seen.
The main antagonist of this movie is a man named Rana Singh. He is the corrupt and sadistic chief of police, who is responsible for a lot of Kid’s trauma. He didn’t get a lot of attention for most of the movie, so I don’t have a very high opinion of his character or performance. Most of this movie is just focused on Kid who is played by Dev Patel. Having already been nominated for an Oscar in the past, I was already expecting a great performance from him, and he still blew my expectations out of the water. Patel was also the director of this movie, which was also his directorial debut. While filming this movie, Patel broke his hand, some of his toes, and fractured his shoulder. This just shows the insanity of some of the stuff he was doing, on not that high of a budget. Even with that budget not being too high, some of the shots in this movie were simply beautiful. The use of the color red throughout is done perfectly, as it shows how his rage finally boiled over and he snapped at the people who wronged him. There’s one shot towards the end of the movie, where the elevator opens with him inside, with just red lighting in the background which is a perfect description of this movie in one shot alone.
I always rate the movies I watch and I rate them based on 10 things in the movie. Those things are: action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this movie an 89/100, and basically every part of this movie is great or perfect. I didn’t overly care for the antagonist but every other part of the movie carries that so it doesn’t overly matter. The score surprised me by how good it was too, and the action truly is special. Some of the best action sequences I’ve ever seen, being up there with ones from movies like Die Hard and John Wick.
