Monkey Man
A political John Wick, that’s new. Of course it’s not filmed in India, Dev Patel would be murdered by RSS goons.
The core is a very simple revenge plot: little kid lives with his mother in a Muslim community, the police is goaded by an Hindu supremacist to pillage and burn the place down, a little ethnic cleansing for Lebensraum, a nice location for a sweatshop. The police chief himself gets in on the action and is about to rape the mother of our hero when she slashes his face. She literally burns for that, our hero has hand wounds trying to put out the fire.
Now the kid grew older, the Hindu guy remains in power, he now supports a politician in the Patriot Party (coff Narenda’s BJP coff). They even made him talk about “communes” and made its color red, to pretend they were communists? He even says his factory has no employees, it’s a commune with followers. Mammon transcends religions.
Our hero is the heel of yet another Mammon-worshipping cult, an underground bare-knuckle fight club. The emcee is a South African scumbag, the typical mobster. That’s his main side-job, through his underground contacts and cunning he gets a low level job on this high-end pleasure house, restaurant, club, brothel combo. This is something he needs to get access to the police chief, of course he would partake on those vices.
It’s easy to get promoted to the upper echelons, just make the enforcer a lot of money by betting correctly on the rigged fight he will throw. After that that guy is enthralled, no more monkey business. On the club, the police chief is available for any vendetta.
He gets a gun from the dude that tries to sell him the John Wick gun (but made in China, natch), trains a street mutt to get the gun past security, and at the final stakeout, befriends the prostitute assigned to the police chief. He nearly loses him cool when noticing the police chief’s abuse, but she is completely cynic and just says Fuggedabouit, it’s Indiatown.
The trap shuts: the test tubes full of “sugar” are replaced with powdered cleaning products, which weakens the police chief, and on the bathroom, our hero is about to just murder him “with the compliments of my mother”, but our hero is too slow, and he fights back. All hell breaks lose and the hero needs to dispatch an entire police squad, plus the club security, but he manages to escape into fresh air. That’s when they send the helicopter, no parkour can save him from that. He gets unceremoniously shot and falls into filthy waters running through a slum.
It was not his time to go. Now it’s when the film starts to heat up. He is rescued by a community of hijra (not transgender) (yeah, Hinduism has some metal religious texts), a tight knit family for those who have none. His new buddies heal his wounds and give him a reason to fight, to protect his new guardians. He trains himself and the other young people there, who giggle and coo at the sight of his ripped six-pack. Beat that rice bag!
After the Hindu supremacist attacks one of their own, it’s time to fight back. How curious, a campaign event on the same brothel he worked at, this is ideal. YOLO, he just rampages through the hundreds of security and rides on the elevator one floor at the time, cleansing the floors of impure people.
The club floor has the police chief alone, just chilling, and a John Wick boss fight ensues. To drive the point home, the coup-de-grâce is done with a high heeled show, with sequins! After a big ensemble of grunts gang up on him, his hijra buddy squad show up and start executing every motherfucking last one of ya! Hot damn! The friendly prostitute also comes out of hiding to kill the madame. Another life touched by an angel.
This leaves our hero free to get to the penthouse and confront the Hindu supremacist. He first defies him, but after getting punctured by a kind of railroad spike, he begs for mercy. Only God Forgives. Redemption does equal death, but at least evil is vanquished and his mother can be proud.
This is a tour de force by Dev Patel, writer, director, producer. Jordan Peele is only a hype man, with no input on the production. The club enforcer is a great comedy role, and Sharlto Copely as the scummy fight club emcee, wow.
This is really different from all other John Wick adaptations, like Atomic Blonde. It’s even more political than Gunpowder Milkshake. It’s even ballsier that I thought: the Indian election is 6 weeks after the film’s release, if it does happen.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.