Monkey Man, Any Wick Way  You Can…. Dev Patel’s  Senseless Bloodbath Is In Bad Taste

Monkey Man, Any Wick Way  You Can…. Dev Patel’s  Senseless Bloodbath Is In Bad Taste

Rating: * 1/2 

 There  is no telling about tastes. Dev Patel’s senseless  bloodbath Monkey Man(Dev plans a Hanuman avatar)  has been nominated for a BAFTA award in the Outstanding Debut as  director  category. Sobhita Dhulipala  who has a role as commodious as  Jacqueline Fernandez in Fateh, is very happy.

  I am happy for her.  But  not quite in the waltzy mode  over the  film. Watching Dev Patel’s much-extolled directorial debut , rightly banned in India  and from Netflix where  it was  scheduled  for  streaming, is a painful  experience. The stylized relentless violence, with stunt  passages  choreographed  like the opposite of a  ballet,are sickening in  their selfimportant gratuitousness.

But  I would forgive  the endless pointless carnage—to each his own John Wick, I guess—were  it not for the  strange uncalled-for references  to Hindu  mythology that keep popping  up with nagging regularity all through the  sanguinary excursion, as if to remind us that there is a deep connection between  religion and violence in India.

Well, perhaps there is. Infuriatingly, Monkey Man lacks the  cultural and  emotional perspective the wherewithal and the  gravitas,  to  make any sense  of that intricate connection between religion and violence. In the absence of erudition, the narrative looks stagey  stilted and self consciously stylized  with the frames  soaked in  blood-red.

 At heart(not sure  if it has won) Monkey Man  is  a mother-son story: an aggravated  amped up avatar  of  Amitabh Bachchan’s Deewaar, perhaps. But what  was intense  in Bachchan  is purely comicbook aggression of the most melodramatic  strain  in Dev Patel’s vision . The portions  showing Patel as a  child with his chirpy mother(Adithi Kalkunte) are  so airy and stagey  in  tone, they look  like  a spoof  of all the  maa-laadla potboilers that  have ever been  made in  India.

  It is  not very  clear—nothing is, not with almost every  frame soaked in  blood—why the  mother keeps drilling Hanuman  stories into her  little son’s  head.Monkey Man/Kid(Patel) takes  the  Hanuman analogy  a  little too seriously. At one  point in the lumbering story Patel’s Kid actually  fantasizes(?)  about ripping  open his chest, a  la Bajrangbali, to express his  anger and come to terms with his mother’s  savage death.

Everyone is  angry in Monkey Man, 24/7.  None more so than Sikandar Kher who as  the brutal villain seems  to be  everywhere that Patel’s Hanuman  goes, including the loo, a venue lately for  staged  stylized violence in cinema.

Kher’s corrupt cop Rana Singh is a direct descendant of Paresh Rawal in Rahul Rawail’s Dacait without the  underlining humour to bolster the brutality.

Humour, most unintentional, props up when table maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain  plays the Tabla in one corner  of  the screen as  Dev Patel’s Human Man/Kid(he also calls himself  Bobby at some  point, the aliases flatter to deceive) practices his  boxing on  the  other end of the screen while  a bunch eunuchs ogle  and scream in delight.

Would Mr Patel please explain the  connection between the  boxing practice, table playing  and eunuchs? Zakir Hussain looks amused and lost.He has been in better movies.   Correct me if I am wrong, but all of this seems like  selling Indian exotica to the West.

What is  specially dismaying is  that  the  script(Dev Patel ,Paul Angunawela ,John Collee) is pure Bollywood Masala, steamed up to  an unbearable  level of aggressive  energy, masquerading as  something deeper .

Dev Patel, playing the  double role of director and leading man gives himself  a variety of avatars: he is  the vengeful son and the brutal boxer at an underground fighting club where  he  fights to  lose for money. He  is also a dog lover at  some point.And  a  champion  of  the minorities.Jai Ho!Quite  an all-rounder. Dev Patel is the Indian  John Wick with Hanuman’s  DNA.  Next time  Patel wants to  do a  self-glorifying action film,  please leave religion out of it.

Oh, almost forgot! And Sobhita Dhulipala  has nothing much to do. And she does it well enough. She  has  screen time of  about four minutes, provided you don’t  blink,  playing a sex worker of sorts, named Sita.I rest my case.