This type of action/revenge story has never been my thing. The first John Wick was good, but I didn’t like every other one. The Raid had great fights and it’s always a bit of fun when a movie can give you those, but I always want a better story than what these movies offer. That’s certainly the case here. However, give credit to actor Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire, The Lion, The Green Knight) for writing, directing, producing and acting (as well as solidifying the role).
Set in a fictional city in India, where the cops are corrupt and the messiah is on the rise. It’s a bit of a muddled narrative and some of the political stuff didn’t quite work. My wife even suggested a few things that would work better (one being a riot with all the people wearing monkey masks).
We see flashbacks with the boy and his mother as she tells him a fable about the Hindu deity Hanuman. We also get scenes of him in underground bare-knuckle brawls for some money (and often getting screwed over by the promoter/ring announcer, played wonderfully by District 9’s Sharlto Copley [fun fact: Patel originally wanted the director of that film to direct this].)
It was a nice surprise that as we watched this guy sneak in to work with the bad guys and get promoted to get closer to the big wigs…things didn’t quite go to plan. This leads to a hilarious car chase and he finds himself brought back to life by some trans women in the community where they live. They also inspire him to train and go on a mission from God (sorry, I just read a story about the making of The Blues Brothers in one of the entertainment magazines).
Patel has mentioned in interviews that he was inspired by Bruce Lee movies, but I was surprised by how a fight scene in the ring with a guy named “The King Cobra” and an even bigger opponent after that, who has a bat with barbed wire around it, felt her just like the fight scene Kurt Russell had as Snake Pliskin in Escape from New York.
It was fun that some of the fight scenes made him take his lumps, and that things don’t always go according to plan (just like Lamorne Morris’ character in “Game Night” saying “These glass tables are acting weird tonight” when no one of them will break when people are thrown into them, sometimes the windows don’t break when you try to jump through them).
Some of the shaky camera and use of POV shots was a bit annoying. And the fight scenes in the third act went a little bananas (see what I did there?). The one that went too far included the appearance of trans women.
There’s a great scene of Patel’s character learning while they play bongo drums or tabla. There was another scene where we hear different versions of “Somebody to Love” and “Roxanne” (it was a little too on the nose when he heard the line “You don’t have to turn on the red light/those days are over/You don’t have to sell your body of the night’ as we see call girls/sex traffic).
And if you’re going to choose classic rock, why not “Monkey Man” by the Rolling Stones. It seems like the lines, “I was bitten by a boar/I was gouged and gored/But I pulled through…” would fit the picture perfectly.
The last John Wick movie I saw (which I hated) made me wonder how many people he could punch and not break his arm or fingers. I thought the same here. Also, I was wondering… how he can fight in these matches with a monkey mask. I wore a mask like this on Halloween once as a kid and lasted two houses before the sweat pouring down my face made it unbearable. But I digress.
The whole movie was a little scattered, but it was fun, although it was probably too violent for some. Decent directorial debut for Patel.
3 stars out of 5.
