- Starring
- Dev Patel, Sharlto Copley
- Director
- Dev Patel
- Rating
- R
- Genre
- Action, Thriller
- Release date
- April 5, 2024
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Hanuman is a prominent figure in Hindu mythology, revered for his unwavering devotion, strength, and loyalty. He is depicted as a monkey god, known for his pivotal role in the epic Ramayana, where he aids Lord Rama in his quest to rescue his wife Sita from the demon king Ravana. Hanuman is also worshipped as a symbol of courage, humility, and selfless service in Hinduism, with temples dedicated to him across India and beyond. He is also the inspiration for Monkey Man.
Monkey Man
A young fighter named Kid plans and exacts his revenge for a lifetime of tyranny and loss.
Review
Monkey Man is a slapdashed action/revenge film with an underdeveloped everything except an overdeveloped sense of its own importance. With a messy narrative scotch taped together with thousands of nausea-inducing fast cuts and a bloated cast of nameless characters that make cardboard cutouts look deep, not even the writer/director/star of the film’s 1000% commitment and impressive physical prowess is enough to make this monstrosity passably entertaining.
If you thought that The Beekeeper was a poor man’s John Wick, Monkey Man is a cheap Indian knockoff to rival Bollywood Superman. From the black-on-black suit to the unstoppable badassery as Dev Patel’s Kid slices his way through one nameless thug after the other, there’s neither an original thought nor even a good one evident at any moment in this husk of a waste of time.
Sidenote: Those of you who have read other reviews on this site know I normally write significantly longer ones than this. However, this movie is 2 hours of noise and strobe lights that I will never get back and have no desire to spend any more time thinking about.
WOKE ELEMENTS
Because he said so
- There need be no ambiguity. The writer, director, and leading actor Dev Patel has expressly said that this film is about activism.
- It is a movie solely about power dynamics and victimization.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Trannies
- Kid is rescued by a temple full of dudes who think that they are women. Their wisdom and kindness drives half of the film.
- Later, they save him again, but this time, they are ninjas in Asian drag queen armor.
Faith: We Should Be Fighting For Each Other… But Not Christians
- In the video above, Dev Patel says that his movie is supposed to be about the beauty and importance of “faith” and that we should come together as one under it.
- In the film’s first scene, after its prologue, a ring announcer who is working the crowd randomly tells them that they consist of people of various religions, which he lists off to cheers. Of course, when he gets to Christianity, the crowd aggressively boos and hisses.
- Sidenote: this is such a meaningless bit of Leftist BS. Faith unto itself is meaningless. My youngest children have faith that a fairy sneaks into their rooms at night to trade money for teeth. There are all kinds of false idols and crazy ideas in which people place their faith. Faith is only good if that in which you have put it is both good and true.
James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
17 comments
Achoy
April 14, 2024 at 11:32 pm
I do not like nor care for anything Jordan Peele does.
Dj
May 5, 2024 at 8:33 am
Likewise. He’s just a one-trick pony hack that makes very boring crap. I was mildly interested in Monkey Man until I saw his name on it.
Bunny With A Keyboard
April 14, 2024 at 11:52 pm
I’m very confused how one might choose to embrace their femininity by becoming a brutal warrior. Perhaps someone can explain how those two things go together?
Sweet Deals
April 15, 2024 at 6:24 pm
Not related to the movie, but I do have a story.
I once worked at a summer job where one of my co-workers was a man in his early twenties who claimed to be female. Because I’ve been told that transgender people tend to be touchy and I valued his privacy, I decided to shrug it off and pretended that he was just going through a colored-hair punk phase. I chose to focus on his other qualities.
The longer I worked with him, the more I discovered that he wasn’t any of the negative stereotypes of transgender people you read about in the news or on TV. He wasn’t a sexual pervert, attention-seeker or an athletic opportunist. He referred to himself as a “frail woman”, and I pointed out that he routinely carried out important tasks that required a degree of physical strength. He voiced objections to middle-school-aged girls looking at him like he was cute because he didn’t want to be sexual abuser. One day while we were talking candidly, he mentioned that he thought of himself as a bit of a bully in high school. He also mentioned that at his school there was a teacher who sexually abused students, and he reacted by commanding his posse to key-scratch the offending teacher’s car. I don’t know for certain and I’m only guessing, but I think that the reason why he chose to adopt a female identity was because he didn’t like his former self and associated those negative qualities with his masculinity, so he became a woman to dissociate himself from that and reinvent himself as someone kinder and gentler.
I haven’t heard from him since, but whatever is going on, I really hope his transgender identity is just a phase and he manages to work out his issues without causing too much damage to himself. Unlike the crazies you see promoted in the news, I’m thinking that it’s possible that a lot of transgender people are simply emotionally confused and have been convinced that becoming transgender could be an escape hatch for them. The odds are that those who changes genders once are more likely to do so again.
David
April 18, 2024 at 11:17 am
That’s the thing with trannies, the only good ones are the ones that get over it.
Ikilitaku167581
August 1, 2024 at 11:51 am
You are so naive.
It’s sad to say but it’s because of people naives like you that wokeness is everywhere.
You just said “He wasn’t a sexual pervert” —> how do you know ? You don’t.
Of course, he won’t do sexual acts in workplace.
The truth pill is that transgenders and other BS aren’t in 99% caused by traumas, they’re caused by sexual degenracy. They are perverts and, most of them, hate themselves that’s why they hide behind trans propaganda. Stop giving them excuses.
They definitly are attention whores too. There is a reason they dress like women, have green hair, force people to use their pronouns and have nose piercings.
Stop being naive if you want a change.
Jared
April 15, 2024 at 12:23 am
So glad I avoided this one (luckily I got ripped off to the tranny nonsense which was an automatic nope from me )
Sweet Deals
April 15, 2024 at 12:33 am
It’s terrible movies like this one that have caused me to lose my faith in movies, popular culture, and humanity in general. Thankfully, I have no intention of watching it.
Frank
April 15, 2024 at 2:32 pm
Maybe you could have gone full Spinal Tap and had a two word review. ###### Sandwich. Or more appropriate for this movie, Monkey ######.
James Carrick
April 15, 2024 at 2:37 pm
Search engines more or less ignore pages with fewer than 300 words in them, so I’ve got to feed the machine.
Chris
April 16, 2024 at 12:29 pm
I saw this thinking it was going to be a good action film about fighting the corrupt elite. It didn’t even take a minute for me to be instantly dissappointed (I saw the scene with the guy humping the girl and thought that just buying a ticket to this counts as heinous adultery). Swing and a miss. Hopefully the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is better (it has to be, this was rock bottom).
James Carrick
April 16, 2024 at 12:45 pm
I do hope that Ministry is good. It looks like a lot of fun and I keep waiting for Cavill to have his breakout roll. He almost got it with Man of Steel and he kinda got it with Mission Impossible, and he could have gotten it with The Witcher (were it not for the insane showrunners), but nothing seems to quite get him over the finish line.
Chris
April 21, 2024 at 1:25 am
Update: It was.
Anil
April 17, 2024 at 11:10 pm
Just a bit of FYI in the context of transgender individuals in India:
Transgenders in India are considered only as “Intersex” individuals (meaning they are born with reproductive organs of both female and male.)
They live completely separate from society, and the western concept of “identifying” oneself as trans has absolutely no relevance in India. And in fact, if you say so in public, you’d be considered mentally ill for thinking that.
David
April 18, 2024 at 11:16 am
For once, I wish the west would do things like India LOL
Chris
May 16, 2024 at 3:34 pm
“the western concept of “identifying” oneself as trans has absolutely no relevance in India. And in fact, if you say so in public, you’d be considered mentally ill for thinking that.”
Update: Peru just enacted this exact thing there.
Michael Karounos
April 29, 2024 at 5:27 pm
James,
While I don’t entirely agree with your hot-take on the movie, I love the panache with which you wreck it. I agree that an audience that goes to see it as an action film will likely have the same response you did. There is much incoherence to behold. However, if one goes to see it as a mythic epic, and see the Kid as an ethnic avenger like Zorro or like Stephen Chow’s character in Kung Fu Hustle, it is worth the brain cells to parse it as a cultural fable. Specifically, the four qualities of Hanuman are embodied by the Kid in his re-incarnation (like Chow’s character) as he takes revenge on the institutional corruption of religion, politics, and civic authority. If Wahlberg and Gibson can make a movie that is as serious a critique of our own society it would be worth wading through the sentiment to see it.