Monkey Man

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I love a good revenge film, as several of my readers probably know by now. It's all about being able to route for the downtrodden, the "little guy," or victims of senseless circumstances. For me, 'John Wick' has the bar set, and set pretty damn high, plowing his way through four movies, each with something fairly unique to offer. Since the release of the first 'JW' (which set that bar), revenge films have still been solid, but not quite the same because, hell, you just do NOT mess with someone's puppy dog!

Nevertheless, it's still one of my favourite sub-genres of action, as they tend to allow the viewer to get inside the head of whoever is victimized and seeking their revenge. For as many as I've seen before, this one hits particularly hard for me, and probably will to anyone else who has a strong relationship with family. It leaves me with mixed emotions. I'd be hard-pressed to think of a revenge plot that I could get more behind (puppies aside), yet I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a few nitpicks about the movie's overall execution.

Kid's (Dev Patel) revenge plot here is aimed mainly at the corrupt Yatana police chief, Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher) and corrupt guru Baba Shakti (Makrand Deshpande). When Kid was a... kid, living a happy life in a quaint Indian village alongside his family, Singh and several others, ordered by Shakti, drove his family out of the village, killing some, and Kid has pretty much devoted himself to revenge since. He makes his money at a grungy, bare-knuckle boxing club as a masked fighter, paid to take dives by his boss, Tiger (Sharlto Copley).

In the meantime, in order to get close to Singh, Kid will need to infiltrate an exclusive luxury brothel called "Kings," run by Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar). He gets himself a job in the kitchen and befriends Alfonso (Pitobash), who ultimately helps him climb the ladder so that he can get closer to Singh and Shakti, not only to avenge the family he lost in the raid on his village, but to free the exploited girls in this brothel as well, namely Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala), whom he also befriends, and appears to be one of the more abused and taken advantage of out of the girls.

Concerning Kid's family getting driven out of their village in such a brutal manor and the victimized girls of this brothel, the desire to see Kid succeed in this mission of his is pretty high. Kid's a very easy character to route for, especially considering how much patience and effort he puts into his mission. What I do like about this is that, unlike John Wick, Kid is sort of an "every-man" who needs to learn and train his way through things. There's something more relatable about that, and for that reason, this feels like there's a bit more heart put into things.

Having said that, let's get into some of the problems I had with things here. Again, a lot of it is me being nitpicky about things. The biggest thing here is that shaky-cam action, which I have a hard time with. I wanna see what the hell is going on, not feel like I'm falling down the stairs, and there's a lot of shaky-cam action to this movie. However, the film's atmosphere is also very rough, raw and almost dirty, so that kind of messy action also sort of makes sense for the feel of things. I'm not mad about it or anything, but shaky cam isn't really for me these days.

The only other thing I can say about it negative is that there's a couple of moments where the viewer might ask "what happened with this character?" Not that it creates plot holes, but some of the characters I liked in this (including a dog who thankfully survives this movie) kinda just get left behind after a while. In the grand scheme of things I can probably think of a lot of better revenge flicks, but there's really nothing particularly bad about this in any way either. 'John Wick' still has that bar set for me, and for as good as this was, it still didn't quite reach. If only the shaky-cam fights were smoother.

3/5

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