Monkey Man
Universal Pictures (2024)
This is one of the few times where I thought that the trailer looked better than the final product. Monkey Man is a very good movie that could have been great, but it didn't quite get there for me.
On the positive side, some of the shots are gorgeous, the fight scenes are great, and Dev Patel delivers an incredible performance. My main issue was the overuse of shakeycam and flashback scenes. The backstory of the title character and his mother is told as a slow drip throughout the movie through flashbacks and hallucinations that seem to take place every five minutes. I get that this is supposed to give me sympathy for the character, but all it did was take me out of the world that the movie had built. It would have flowed much more effectively if they just told the story of the boy and his mother in its entirety at the start of the film (maybe as a dream after the first Monkey Man fight) and then let his vengeance tale play out uninterrupted.
Monkey Man is a very good movie overall that I'd recommend to anyone who enjoyed John Wick and The Beekeeper, but I think it could have been much better.
