A Most Violent Year

Yes, that’s the quite marvelous actor Dev Patel above, as we see him at a turning point early on in "Monkey Man.” Soon we learn his character Kid is mad as hell and he most certainly is not gonna take it anymore. It was also Patel's directorial debut.  

Patel is still best known for his hero’s journey in the also India-themed  “Slum Dog Millionaire,” which cleaned up at the 2017 Oscars (Best Picture and Director, among others) and won Patel a SAG Supporting Actor nom. He’ll turn 34 this month with a row of virtuous projects to his credit, but his anointing by the industry truly arrived in March when his  he film debuted at South by Southwest, with a fervent audience  ovation and, for a moment, a score of 100 on Rotten Tomatoes. (The tallies since dialed down to the 80s, but  the debut was still a thumping career enhancer that tees him up quite nicely for the next outing .) 

 Indeed, there’s much to like: Patel’s unforced magnetism, the striking settings in a grimy urban dystopia (Indonesia standing in for India), just enough arch jokes (as in, don’t try to fling yourself through bulletproof glass), scads of beautiful women (some trans), a  convincing portrayal of brutal caste and class disparities as a nation leans to the right,  and midway through, a piquant if  overly languorous immersion in the hide-out of India’s “third gender”. 

There’s fun to be had in several slam-bang set pieces--one twisty journey of  a stolen item through slum-grungy, teeming  back alleys pays off with a winking surprise that made an L.A. screening  crowd gasp, laugh and natter  over it. 

But--and I want to take care not to inflate this complaint into a  thumb-sucker on the state of cinema—there’s simply too much slap, punch, gouge, shoot, kick, repeat, punch…punch…punch. “Patel does some fine work in “Monkey Man,” wrote the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, “even if its fight sequences rarely pop, flow or impress; they’re energetic but uninspired.”

Understood, this approach is demonstrably exactly how much of commercial moviemaking scores an audience in 2024. It goes without saying that not all of this noisy, bloody battering is what you could call character-driven.    

 Patel has been frank (or promotion-minded) enough to tell us he risked a permanently disabled hand in executing late fight sequences in the guerilla filmmaking  ethos he boldly undertook, and bravo to that, but he might have spared us, some critics have remarked,  some minutes  of the prolonged training montage--albeit mingled with some spiritual awakening.  

Pause to consider John Wick universe, which has its own Asian-auterurist, stock-chop-socky forebears.  Keanu Reaves’s John elaborately shows his fistic zeal, his close-range delivery of bullets to the head, his flips and kicks.  As a filmgoer I admit to a fatigue with the  convention that he can duck or dash generally unhit through fusillades of handgun or assault rifle fire, or bounce off a car roof after a thirty-foot drop, yet almost never going down longer than it takes to stuff the next load of popcorn in your mouth. The word they hand us is “balletic”. Okay, yes, not to be a hoople--but I don’t remember asking for ballet. 

There is a school of film criticism that calls the registered classic “Old Boy," Park Chan-wook’s 2003 South Korean gangster/revenge story, a vital touchstone for such fare. (The director's seven-part HBO series, made with Don McKellar from the Pulitzer-winning "The Sympathizer," just dropped to divided reviews.)

Perhaps too often both current and foreruner gore-fests feature scene blocking that insists one man with his fists and wits can defeat ten or fifteen brigands with swords 

 I detect, in the words of some of my favorite film critics, a certain impatience we share. The ever-savvy Justin Chang, writing in the L.A.  Times before his recent move to the New Yorker, noted that “There are moments when the pummeling virtuosity of “Chapter 4” sputters and stalls, when its entrancing beauty takes an unproductive, ponderous turn.”

 Nonetheless, kudos to Chad Stahelski (and his predecessor and sometime collaborator David Leitch—also a former stunt man about to have a big summer with the stunt-centric Ryan Gosling entry “The Fall Guy”) for all they can do with a camera and a small fortune. There are held images (and some moving shots) that one wants to frame and take home.  I bow to few in my admiration for the work of cinematographer Dan Laustsen—for inventiveness, crisp images, and an eye for beauty where  one is surprised to find it—so points to him and director Stahelski.

All that said,  who else out there is losing interest in the incessant beatdowns current action movies are asking us to…enjoy?  

 A contrarian  whinge, perhaps. Johnny, as some tag Keanu's character, has no dearth of fans. The 12 months of box office  that kicked off when “John Wick 4” dropped in mid- March of 2023 brought the sequel’s box office to over four times its production cost of $100 million--so clearly distributor Lionsgate will find a way to spin off new elaborations of the franchise. In  fact key veterans of  the principal filmmaking team already have the prequel “Ballerina” in the can for a likely June, 2025 release.

I’ll go. Ana de Armas is totally delicious and she can thwap a foot in a bad guy’s face about as well as any  woman in the game. But, and then I'll stop, can’t we move the action scripts back toward that old idea of “story” and away from what my TVs “Wick 4” closed captions describe as “groaning henchmen”  and “ flesh squelching?" (I’ve got some related thoughts about the curiously quirky Jake Gyllenhaal/Doug Liman Netflix streamer “Road House” that will soon be aired in this newsletter.)

The New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote of “Wick 4” that the director “displays little imagination regarding the characters’ activity, or even existence, outside the realm of combat.” In one instance, he notes, “the stakes are lowered beneath the absurdity line by the relentless mayhem, which is at once cartoonish and mostly humorless.”

With more obvious self-awareness, he continues. “the killings are (as in the first three chapters) classist and trivializing.”

Despite it all, along with those hopes for the coming Wick entry, one has  even higher hopes for Patel. “He will make a great movie one day,”  said Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri.

“Monkey Man” deserves our support in the cinemas while we can catch it. (Difference-making producer Jordan Peele took an early interest, and it was then diverted from originally slated Netflix  streaming to have a  North American theatrical release by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, via Universal.) “This is a film that simply demands to be seen in a theater with a huge rockstar audience,” Peele said  in lauding Patel at the SXSW premiere, “I’ve never seen someone pour his heart, soul, body, mind and energy into a film, into a story more than this man.”