There is nothing wrong with Monkey Man.
Is it a perfect movie? Well… how do you define movie perfection?
For me, the experience of Monkey Man was a bit hollow. It wasn’t that anything was wrong. It was that I never had much time when I felt like I was experiencing something I hadn’t felt before… repeatedly.
I don’t believe in Superhero Fatigue. I believe that people just run into a superhero movie or movies - or any genre, really - that just aren’t as compelling. They stop surprising us. And that feels like exhaustion with a genre… until someone makes a film in that genre that shocks us into excitement once again. (It’s exactly what Disney is hoping for from Deadpool & Wolverine this summer.)
Those moments you remember from movies that you remember loving… those are the moments that define entire genres.
The master of this phenomenon, extended out a bit, is James Cameron. It’s an oversimplification of his unmatched success as a filmmaker, but he is The Third Act King. There are many wonderful things in the first 2/3 of Titanic. But what made it the most popular film of all time by a massive margin, in its time, was that third act… the sinking of The Titanic. Scene after scene, beat after beat, there was no escape for the audience. Cameron grabbed us and pulled us brutally into that moment of history and all of its emotions. Yes, the romance of Jack and Rose made the movie more than the third act, especially for women. But everything that people see as weaknesses in Cameron’s game was in those first two overly long acts. You have the “King of the world” moment, the portrait moment, dropping the Heart of the Ocean in the sea… pretty much the moments what people take with them from those first 2 long acts. People try to forget Billy Zane (who doesn’t deserve the abuse… he is a good actor who was just doing his job). But that 3rd act is like a pinball machine of a dozen strong, visceral memories, right up to Jack slipping away into the water, which people still argue about today.
It feels ironic to be writing this in light of the passing of the great Joe Flaherty, but Christopher Nolan blows stuff up real good in Oppenheimer. I love the movie from beginning to end and feel it is the most Nolan movie of all the Nolan movies. A masterpiece. But never has a bomb going off had the impact of the Trinity test shown at the end of the 2nd act of that film. I spent months - and it still comes up - discussing why many people had a hard time with the 3rd act of the film. It’s because for people who want That Moment in their movies, there is no getting over Trinity. I feel that the completion of the experience for both Oppenheimer and Strauss (aka, the 3rd act) was incredible as well and completely necessary. But the emotional explosions of regret and repercussion can never measure up to that literally explosive moment. So much so that people have convinced themselves - aside from political arguments about looking away from abuse - that they wanted to see Hiroshima go up. Nolan’s drama was much more compelling than the absolute horrors of that atrocity brought to cinematic life. But like addicts jonzing for their next fix, the third act was a thrill crash when many were looking for the next high.
Tarantino has become a pointedly better director over the course of his films. But even in the earliest works, where there are directorial limits, he has always been a master of The Moment. How many unforgettable moments are there amongst some rookie flaws in Reservoir Dogs?
Which brings me back to Monkey Man, Dev Patel’s feature directing debut.
I saw it before I saw it.
Patel and writing collaborators John Collee and Paul Angunawela do a really nice job of chopping up all the ingredients - every first-person-fighting genre film you’ve ever seen - and mixing them with the right amount of spice and choosing a distinct color palette and degree of darkness and giving it a distinctly Indian twist in the casting and baking it all up in a tasty way.
But as I watched it, I felt more like I was going through a checklist than like I was experiencing an exciting new story or experience.
Now… I see a lot of movies. Probably in the top .1% of the number of new movies seen by any individual each year in the world. (That’s still a group of 8 million people, so not really a big brag.) Slumdog Millionaire is 16 years old already… almost a full generation who don’t know what you are talking about when you bring it up. So what I, like many of my colleagues, has seen is a deeper pool than most audiences. When Tarantino borrowed from international action films, it still felt fresh to us in the absence of VHS, DVD, and Streaming. He was in the .001% of film watchers.
Patel and his creative partners reference movies from the black and white era - particularly in international cinema - and Shaw Bros movies, as well as the most recent movies and their trends, and more.
Thinking of one gag that felt recycled, I tend to think that the moment in Game of Thrones when Arya Stark drops the knife from her left hand to her right hand while the Night King has her by the throat created a new genus for close-up kills. The most recent spin being taking the knife you have been deeply stabbed with out of your own body to stab your adversary. I’m sure there is someone who ranks even higher in the .1% of movies seen that recalls a version of this from before the last year. But I feel like I have seen this particular twist (so to speak) a bunch of times in the last year. (Road House is still fresh in my mind.) It feels almost unfair to accuse anyone of copying, as they were all probably making their films in their bubbles with no awareness that others were doing it. I just somehow became A Thing, all in the same period. It happens.
Point is… maybe I am suffering from a kind of ennui around this kind of movie. I like the last John Wick movie more as a series of remarkable chunks of action cinema, sandblasted together, than I do as a total movie. I liked it… but the people who loved it… I don’t know. Am I the asshole if I go to the Roman Coliseum and see the lions eat some Christians and roll my eyes because we have seen that same thing over and over and yeah, that second Christian in the arena this week really had some new moves that we haven’t see before, but he still got the teeth in the neck by the end?
The answer may be “yes,” simply for my attendance. But what really excites me would be seeing a Christian pull the claw out of the lions paw and kill the lion with it. I mean, not every week. That would become predictable too.
Monkey Man is a good roller coaster ride.
And maybe I just wasn’t in the brain space for a movie that night that does change the color palate (visual and racial) and was very dark visually (reminded me of Irreversible and Refn’s Pusher films often) and is jammed packed with visceral violent entertainment.
But I wasn’t excited. I saw it all. But I knew what was coming… not literally, but organically. I mean, you just can’t do the thing where you tease the backstory through the film and think the audience isn’t 2 miles ahead of you when you get to The Reveal anymore. How many times have we seen a removed finger that is used to get past security that reads a fingerprint by now? Etc.
I was waiting for the thing that brought this particular film above all the others… or to some distinctly different place. And maybe that is an unreasonable expectation.
Going back to the last John Wick film… the stair sequence. What ultimately makes that sequence magical is the whole of it… the repetition and variations within it. If you watch any one segment of the fight to get up those stairs, it is high-quality action fighting filmmaking. Okay. But it is the story of the whole sequence, from start to finish, that rises above.
Chad Stahelski didn’t invent getting a short distance in a very long time in a movie, confronted every step of the way. But he made it fresh. He brought it to his context. It’s why Laurel & Hardy’s The Music Box still works today, 92 years after its release and why John Wick trying to get up those stairs is one of the most memorable film moments of last year.
I just never got that in Monkey Man.
But I like Monkey Man. I admire Monkey Man. I love that Dev has become a director.
Kind of reminds me of my feelings about Anyone But You earlier this year. People needed that rom-com itch scratched. The film was okay. The performances were fine. There was nothing very original about the film. (Monkey Man is better at its genre.) But who am I to tell people not to get their rom-com on if that is what they want?
Enjoy it if it’s the flavor for which you are hungering. Go to the movie theater. See it with a lot of people. Have a great time.
I will expect Dev Patel’s next film to have just a bit more Dev in its soul. I am sure this one took everything out of him, behind and in front of the camera. But that is what growth is in a good filmmaker. Every war is impossible. But when it is over, you learn about filmmaking and yourself and you bring it to the next war.
For Dev Patel, this is a very solid start. Looking forward to more.
Until tomorrow…
As always a pleasure. But yes you are the ashhole. We all are.