A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, March 6, 2025

Monkey Man (Dev Patel, 2024)


Cast: Dev Patel, Pitobash, Jatin Malik, Sikandar Kher, Sobhita Dhulipala, Makrand Deshpande, Ashwini Kalsekar, Vipin Sharma, Adithi Kalkunte, Jomon Thomas, Pehan Abdul, Sharlto Copley, Zakir Hussain. Screenplay: Dev Patel, Paul Angunwela, John Collee. Cinematography: Sharone Meir. Production design: Pawas Sawatchaiyamet. Film editing: Joe Galdo, Dávid Jancsó, Tim Murrell. Music: Jed Kurzel. 

Producer-writer-director-star Dev Patel's Monkey Man is so obviously modeled on Chad Stahelski's John Wick (2014) and its sequels, that it's no surprise when a character  in the movie name-checks it. Monkey Man has the same energy, the same world-building ambiance, and in Patel a hero with much the same kind of low-key charisma that Keanu Reeves's Wick possesses. There's even a dog that befriends the hero. Which is not to say that Patel's hyperviolent knock-off isn't a worthy successor to its predecessor. If action movies with a lot of clear-cut villains that get their bloody comeuppance after making the hero's life hell are your thing, Monkey Man will do the job better than most. 

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