'Monkey Man' Is Dev Patel's Arrival Moment
#266: "Monkey Man," "Steve!," "Rain Man," "Curb Your Enthusiasm"
Edition 266:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: Dev Patel may have missed out on Bond (shame!), but turns out he’s a heck of a director in the action thriller Monkey Man. We check in on Netflix’s evolving library and a new Steve Martin documentary before handing out some streaming recs for the weekend. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” the platonic ideal of what I want movie trailers to be.
Monkey Man
Just when the search for a new James Bond has all but concluded and the rumor mill has anointed Aaron Taylor-Johnson, I’d like to submit into evidence one final plea on my long-running campaign for Dev Patel. May I present the 33-year-old Brit, 6-foot-2 and now absolutely shredded, looking handsome and suave as ever, wearing a sleek suit and tie/bowtie and beating the crap out of people for two straight hours. As far as Bond tryouts go, this was an A+.
Alas, Patel seems to have other ambitions. Namely, Monkey Man marks his debut as a writer and director, and he’s chosen to take us back to the impoverished underworld of India that first made him famous in Slumdog Millionaire. Except this time, instead of rising from the ashes, Patel’s character is more focused on burning the 1-percenters to the ground with him.
Class warfare is the not so subtle glue that holds together this collection of action set pieces, with a literal elevator separating various levels of wealth inside an exclusive nightclub where much of the action takes place. Patel is on a revenge mission for his murdered mother, first as sort of a crazy untrained kid with a death wish and then, after undergoing a Rocky-esque training montage at a temple, as nothing short of a superhero.
It’ll be easy for most people to reach for John Wick as the closest comparison point, but a far more accurate comp is a comic book. And no, I don’t mean a comic book movie, with its paint-by-numbers plots and CGI punchfest finales. I mean like an actual physical comic book.
You can understand what I’m saying without ever having read one. All the settings and characters are heightened, believable in theory extreme in practice. The hero goes through trauma, punches a bag of rice a couple hundred times, and comes out the other side with a full mastery of weapon proficiency and kung fu. Oh, and he does a lot of it while wearing a monkey mask.
Which, for the record, no one in the audience is complaining. Watching Patel punch, kick, slice and bite his way through bad guys is top shelf entertainment, and Patel has proven himself a more than capable filmmaker. His camera is shaky, blurry and in your face, harkening back to the style of the Bourne movies but less coherent and more chaotic (purposely, I think). You can really feel the impact of the combat as it unfolds, and if you’re into punch-em-up movies, you’re gonna get really fired up watching this.
It’s a very well done revenge genre movie, and I actually admire that the movie doesn’t pull its punches, literally (there are some very gory kills) and metaphorically. Weirdly I did feel a pang of morality, because usually in a movie like this the hero seeks some higher purpose or only summons his anger righteously. Here, he confronts his trauma by consulting a shaman-type figure who tells him, essentially, that he won’t stop being angry at the people who wronged him until he’s brutally murdered all of them.
I mean…fair enough. I disagree with that line of thinking, but in a movie landscape where every script has been therapized within an inch of its life I actually kind of like how much I bumped against that. Seriously, movies started getting worse right around the time every screenwriter started going to therapy (super happy for them personally for the record!).
All I know is that if Jordan Peele wants to use his Monkeypaw production company to support ambitious films like this for like $10-ish million a pop, with the weight of Universal distributing and promoting, I would honestly watch 20 movies like it every single year. And while I continue to consider Patel among that elite class of rising movie stars under 35 (consider for a second he’s only one year older than Austin Butler), if he wants to go on to be a serious filmmaker I will line up for each and every installment until further notice.
Something New
Steve! (AppleTV+): Steve Martin is one of the most influential entertainers of the past 40 years, and depending on how old you are, he means something completely different. He was the biggest stand-up comic in the world in the 1970s, a slapstick comedy movie star in the 80s, a sentimental dad figure in movies in the 90s and 2000s, and then in recent years a star again with “Only Murders In The Building.” That leaves a lot to explore in a wide-ranging, two-part documentary on his life from the master documentarian Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain).
Is it hagiography? Yes, kind of, but handled tastefully. The first section focuses on his early work, mostly archival footage, and I found it more typical of these kinds of biographical stories. But the second part — and I’d almost suggest you just skip to the 2nd part, since each one is 90 minutes — is excellent, telling the story of his movie career interspersed with his life in the present day, focusing on how against all odds he found peace and happiness after years of longing, loneliness and dissatisfaction. His interactions with his family and his bestie Martin Short are genuine and heart-warming, which resonates a lot more than a greatest hits of his funniest moments (of which there are plenty). If you’re a fan of Martin, and I’d challenge you to find a single person who isn’t, I’d recommend this trip down memory lane.
Netflix: While we can’t completely confirm The Big Red Machine’s change in strategy, my hunch that they’re going to scale back on originals and invest more heavily in licensing preexisting movies and shows (think the “Suits” effect) gets further evidence this month when you fire up the service and see a ton of additions from the past few years, some that are crap (Skyscraper, Space Jam 2, The Little Things, and a strong contender for the worst movie I’ve ever seen, Glass), and others that I’ve highly recommended: Baby Driver, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Dumb Money, Split.
Plus, Netflix ain’t outta the originals business entirely. “Ripley” starring Andrew Scott debuted on Thursday, and even though I haven’t watched it yet I will almost definitely be recommending next week.
Something Old
Rain Man (1988, Amazon Prime): This was one of those movies that got quoted in my house so much when I was a kid that I just assumed everyone had seen it. But when I was talking about going to Las Vegas next week for CinemaCon with some friends, and mentioned the famous blackjack scene, I was horrified to discover none of them had seen it.
Tom Cruise stars as a rich jerk who finds out his has an autistic brother, played in an Oscar-winning if not entirely 2024-approved performance by Dustin Hoffman, and the two go on a long road trip together across the country. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the movie and yet every single element of it is so exceptionally well done — which is how you end up winning Oscars for acting, directing, writing, and Best Picture — that it’s sort of undeniably awesome. And quotable. Just ask my dad!
Something to Stream
Curb Your Enthusiasm (Max): ‘Do you respect wood?’ Larry David takes his final bow after 12 seasons and more than 20 years during the series finale this Sunday. For Forbes, I wrote about David’s legacy, first as co-creator of Seinfeld and now as star playing a fictionalized version of himself, jobs that have made him enormously wealthy but oddly very aggressive in denying that he has money.
Needless to say, he didn’t comment on our estimate that his net worth is near $400 million. Though to be fair, Jerry Seinfeld’s publicist called me this week to voice her discontent about us printing his $1 billion net worth in the story too. There’s something appropriate about ruffling feathers when talking about Curb, a show centered about not being able to get over the minutia of every day life.
Trailer Watch: Kings of Kindness
Since starting this newsletter in 2018, I’ve probably talked about, what, like 200 movie trailers? And during that time you all have heard my repeated screed about how trailers shouldn’t be two minutes long and shouldn’t trace the plot arc of the movie.
Well folks, here’s the counterpoint. THIS is exactly what a movie trailer should be. It’s 46 seconds, gives us the vibe of the movie, shows off some impressive looking sets and shots, tells us who the cast is, flashes the credentials of the filmmakers, and gets us super fired up to see the movie without giving away a single thing about what the movie is actually about. Emma Stone reteaming with Yorgos Lanthimos after winning an Oscar for Poor Things is an easy sell regardless, especially when you throw in Jessie Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, but this trailer got me incredibly excited for what will almost certainly be a very weird movie. To the rest of Hollywood: TAKE NOTES!