Opinion: ‘Monkey Man’ knocks James Bond out of the ring

Editor’s note: Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat) is a freelance writer living in Chicago. The views expressed here are his own.view more opinions On CNN.

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Action movies tend to be predictable, both in terms of how the story unfolds (the underdog fights and clearly loses…then wins!) and who becomes the rampaging hero as the story unfolds. It’s a genre. Monkey Man, director Dev Patel’s wildly dreamy, frenzied revenge drama, is at once pleasantly familiar and wonderfully strange in its context, and producer Jordan hopes it will diversify the film’s genre offerings.・It is firmly aligned with Peel’s long-standing mission.

Like “Get Out,” “Candyman,” and other Peele-backed films, “Monkeyman” is an example of when creators make horror, action, and other genres less than the default white. It also shows us rethinking them in unexpected ways. Peele, and now Patel, are determined to make you realize just how entrenched the genres you love are.

“Monkey Man” is set in a semi-fictionalized Mumbai, full of homelessness, crime and swooping, oblique camera angles. Dev Patel plays the Kid, a scrawny Scrambler who makes a precarious living by competing as a wrestler while wearing a monkey mask. But his real job is revenge. He takes a job as a dishwasher at a sleazy club to get closer to his target, police chief Rana (Sikandar Kher).

A lot of this is pretty standard issue. Lana turns out to be the bad guy thanks to his questionable choice of beard. In this seedy club, many sex workers flit around seeking the lewd pleasures of miscreants and moviegoers. There are strategically placed montages of him training. There’s a car chase. John Wick has been critically acclaimed, and Kid’s backstory – a traumatic childhood that led him to wear a mask and act as a vigilante – suggests that in this case, the Joker and Commissioner Gordon are the same person. It also reminds me a lot of Batman.

The structure and references aren’t particularly surprising, but the approach is refreshingly disorienting. Typically, action and revenge movies set in non-Western regions and marketed to Western audiences center a white hero, who is often forced to engage in extreme virtual tourism. Provides a stable perspective for you to enjoy. James Bond races from a tropical island to East Asia in his perfect suit. In the “Extraction” movie, Chris Hemsworth’s Tyler Rake sweats his way through South Asia and Eastern Europe, destroying various dark-skinned antagonists. Dune’s main character, Paul Atreides, leaves his lush homeland to rule over the desert people of the hinterland.

There is a linear necessity to these stories. The protagonist begins in a place where things are (supposedly) stable and civilized. They then travel there, where crime and death are rampant, to impose an (implicitly colonial) order.

In contrast, “Monkey Man” revels in its refusal to offer an outsider’s perspective. Exposition and backstory are delivered haphazardly, while a rapidly moving camera exposes you to the action at street level, untangling myths, relationships, antagonisms, and political metaphors as much as possible.

For viewers and characters alike, everyone starts behind a monkey mask in the ring, and blood, fists, teeth, and ultra-violent fight choreography (including a surprising amount of bites) are yours to take. I try to look through my eye sockets to see it coming towards me. You know what’s going to happen next, but at the same time, you’re not expecting some dastardly street dog aid or a nice deus ex machina from a trans female warrior-priest.

It’s clear that Patel wasn’t the first creator to think about and experiment with how the genre would change if we disrupted assumptions about who would be at the center of which stories. Bruce Lee’s martial arts films were made overseas, but in the United States, their depictions of non-white heroes kicking ass and gaining fame became important symbols of empowerment and resistance for black audiences.

Carl Franklin’s excellent 1995 The Devil in the Blue Dress is a neo-noir in which the genre’s moral ambiguity is contrasted and scrambled with the ambiguity of racial identity and racial passing. Alice Wu’s 2004 “Savings” Faith’ deepens the romantic comedy’s message that love conquers all by focusing on a lesbian relationship between two Chinese-American women. And, of course, Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out reversed the horror association of marginalized people with fear by turning white people into all-powerful, conscienceless, greedy Others.

However, these earlier works focused on genres (noir, rom-coms, horror) that could be produced with limited resources and that could recoup their investment even if they failed to reach a mainstream audience. Most of the works were on a budget. Still, Devil in the Blue Dress (which cost the equivalent of $27 million to make) failed to recoup its budget, and neither did Saving Face, despite having a lower production budget of $2.5 million.

Action movies, even relatively gritty ones without fancy superhero CGI, require a lot of money for locations and stunts. Movies like “Black Panther” are also coming out little by little. But even without the greats of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s still a huge incentive to play it safe in terms of who becomes the star and how the story is told.

Produced on a budget of $4.5 million and grossing an astonishing $255 million at the box office, Get Out served as a role model (along with Black Panther) and made Jordan Peele a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood. He helped change common sense because he made it so. Peele has produced (“Us,” “Nope”) and produced (“Candyman”) his own black horror films, and films like “His House” and “The Blackening” have been greenlit. By creating such a space, he created a renaissance of black horror films. .

Now, Peele is leveraging his resources to branch out beyond horror into other genres. “Monkey Man” was plagued by production difficulties and financial difficulties. Netflix bought it but then abandoned it. If Peele hadn’t grabbed it for a whopping $10 million and tossed it out of the ring and into the crowd, it might still be sitting on some obscure shelf collecting dust and disinterest.

“The action genre has been exploited by the system,” Patel said at a screening of the film at SXSW. It’s an admirable sentiment, and it’s not just limited to action movies. The genre is fun in part because it hits the beats you expect. But when creators tell the same stories about the same people, everything almost inevitably ends up looking and sounding the same.

When you put a different mask on a face you know, or put a different face behind the mask, you can see new possibilities in old, clichéd stories. “Monkey Man” growls, spits, beats his chest, and flies off to nowhere. More action movies should be this hairy and weird. Thanks to Peele and Patel, there will probably be more.