Bringing ‘Monkey Man’ to the Big Screen

Welcome back to this Tuesday’s across the movie. I will present it by Bulwark Plus. I am your host Sunny Manch Culture Editor of The Bulwark, and I am joined always by the award winning, Alyssa Rosenberg of the Washington Post and Peter Souderven of Reason Magazine. Alyssa, Peter, how are you today in person? Live and in person.

I’m so happy to be in a room with the two of you. It’s the greatest.

I am also so happy to be talking about movies with friends with those friends in person. It’s not live though. It’s it’s kind of being

We’re all live. We’re all live. A new person. This is, going to be taped to people. Anyway, last chance to pick up across the movie aisle live tickets.

We’re watching arrival. It’s tonight at the Bryant Street Alamo Draft House location seven PM. We’re gonna be talking about the movie after we see it. It’s gonna be fun. Come drink a beer.

Get, some food. They’ve got great popcorn. Everyone loves that. It’s gonna be a good time. Alright.

Now on to controversies and controversies, Duane, the rock Johnson professional wrestler. And Action Star extraordinaire made some waves this week when he came out and said he’s not endorsing anyone. It’s a non endorsement wave folks, it’s it’s it’s happening. Now a non endorsement is not usually a big deal, but it’s kind of interesting. Nonetheless, I mean, he he showed up at two thousand GOP Convention.

He endorsed Joe Biden in twenty twenty. You know, he’s something of a weather vain is what I’m saying. And the fact that Johnson in the midst of a conscious rebranding of sorts following the weak box office of Black Adam, and a general retrenchment of his public persona, is also hitting back at, you guessed it folks, woke culture. Alright. So here is, here is Duane Johnson on the endorsement.

What that caused that, meaning the endorsement of Biden back in twenty twenty, was something that tears me up in the guts, which is division that got me. I didn’t realize that then, I just felt like it was a lot of unrest and I’d like to calm things down. It doesn’t help matters that the rock said no. When he was asked if he was happy with the state of America, quote, today’s cancel culture woke culture division, etcetera. That really bugs me, end quote, Johnson said to Fox News as well, Kain, quote, in the spirit of that, you either succumb to that and be what other people want you to be, or you be yourself and be real.

And that might make people upset and piss people off. And that’s okay. That’s okay. Alright. And now I can practically hear JBLs had exploding from here.

Doesn’t the rock understand that everything is great right now that we’re all better off than we were years ago, that unemployment is down, wages are up. You know, everything is everything’s coming up, roses. But I think it’s worth paying attention to what Johnson is saying here. Not be he happened to go online with previous winners though. I think there’s again, there’s, like, a interesting weather main thing here.

It’s because the rock has really built his entire persona on understanding when the audience wants a baby face and when they wanna heal to use the parlance of his preferred sport entertainment the electoral vibes as they say are bad for Joe Biden. They just that’s the things things not looking great. Still, And this is this is gonna annoy a lot of our listeners and some of our subscribers that just I gotta speak my truth here. Gotta speak my truth I am basically fine with actors and entertainers more generally staying quiet on matters of politics, not for shut up and dribble reasons, not, you know, keep it to yourself. Folks, don’t wanna hear.

Not because of that. More for tactical reasons, you know what plays right into Trump’s hands? Having a bunch of Hollywood elites come out and say he’s terrible and they don’t they don’t want anything to do with him. There’s nothing that endears him more to his base than the hatred of the tastemakers. We live in an age of incredible negative polarization, the who versus age is, I like to think of it, the age of being happily pushed into the angry arms of someone who will tell us, that we hate the right people because the wrong people hate us.

And there’s something to be said strategically for silence. Strategic silence not a terrible thing. Alyssa, as perhaps the charter member of the journalist chapter of the rock for president’s club. What do you make of Duane Johnson’s political instincts here?

If I can step back for a moment and say that I just find this whole turn incredibly boring. You know, once upon a time, There was this possibility that Duane Johnson was gonna be a kind of interesting actor. Right? He is definitely the best part of be cool, the sequel to shorty in which he plays a sort of tormented closeted, gay chauffeur to one of the main characters. He is incredibly watchable in the deeply, deeply insane southland tales, a movie that, you know, has a special place in my heart and probably says, far too much about me that it occupies that place in my heart.

And his career and his public persona had become incredibly boring. Right? You know, I think that we have all sort of broadly agreed that his turns in fast and furious movies, his turns in Black Adam, have become just sort of generic in a way that is kind of surprising given his sort of gift for reading a crowd, the idiosyncrasy of his earlier Bulwark, and turning to the sort of canceled culture stuff, it’s just the dullest thing that can possibly happen. For any public persona in my personal point of view. Just because it’s so I mean, the contours of it are so well worn.

Right? It’s just there’s nothing distinct about anything that he’s saying here. And so Yeah. I think it’s not great for Joe Biden that he’s not getting sort of a subsequent endorsement from someone who is very good at kind of reading the political mood of the country, kind of surfing crowd sentiment as it will. But I I almost care to hear more about the sort of ultimate wariness of Duane Johnson as a artistic and political personality than I do about his perceived impact from the election.

Now here’s here’s I’m gonna do a little esoteric reading here. I’m gonna get a little little Chicago on everybody.

And, and Strausian Sunny is the best, Sonny.

And here so here’s what You did

work at the weekly standards.

Oh, you mean, not the musical.

Oh, no. No. No. No. No.

No. The, as in the philosopher. Bill Crystal’s probably screaming into his headphones right now.

No. The alright. So here’s

the Stroussian reading on what is happening right now. You know what? What’s happening with the rock? He is making he’s making a very pronounced heel turn. And again, this in the in the world of, wrestling.

And I I mean this in in in wrestling itself and in what he is doing in his current day job, which is performing for the world wrestling entertainment organization. He is he’s become a heel. He’s beating up Cody Rhodes. He’s he’s, you know, causing all sorts of chaos. He’s doing he’s doing bad things.

Nobody he’s he’s yelling at mothers of wrestlers and he’s telling them that their kids are idiots. And, like, he’s doing he’s doing he’s being a bad guy. He’s doing bad guy things. And what I would suggest is that this is all him playing into the bad guy persona. Right, Peter?

Like, he’s saying, oh, Walt culture. Walt culture. That’s what the bad guys are saying he’s actually, I’m not gonna endorse Joe Biden because that’s what the bad guys are doing. Is that what is happening here?

No. I don’t think

so. Is that is that the deep read on this?

No. I think he’s is joining the side of cancel culture is bad. Okay. I think that’s all there. Look, this is a, like, a classic case of somebody realizing maybe a little belatedly, but also, as you say, be given his weather vane status, realizing that Republicans buy shoes too.

Right? That that famous Michael Jordan, quote, about like why he wasn’t getting involved in politics. Despite the fact that we now know that Michael Jordan, and people in his orbit had really quite strong political views. He he didn’t feel like that was his business and he wanted to be able to talk to and market to and sell to people who didn’t share his political views and I think that’s probably what’s happening. Here with Iraq.

You know, he’s got red notice too coming up and he needs those thirty second view equivalents because you’re not gonna click on that little icon. With with his face on it on Netflix and he’s not gonna get his click bonus unless, right? Like, if you’re, like, worried that he’s a Biden guy if you’re if you don’t understand that he’s with you on canceled culture.

But, I mean, do we think that his artistic brand was substantially hurt by that endorsement. Because there are two things going on here. Right? I mean, he made this decision to kind of step into the arena in this you know, this way that was not about him sort of nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, and think, look, I have a deal run for president someday. He made an endorsement.

He actually stepped into the fray. But also his career is kind of sputtered. Right? And if there is not strong evidence that endorsing Biden is sort of the causal reason, then does the Republicans buy two shoes two explanation hold up? Or do you think that’s sort of the easiest analysis for him to grasp instead of saying, like, I made a bunch of bad choices and, like, amazingly enough Vine diesel maneuvered me in the bizarre, you know, fast and furious

That’s what that’s what this segment should have been, like, whether Vin diesel or the rock is the better, like, actor entrepreneur, like, brand manager of them selves. Right? Like whether the because the rock is, you know, the guy who was gonna be the interesting weird actor. But Vin diesel is also this, like, weird, kind of, like, people think of him as this kind of, lunkhead.

But he’s a bizarre method guy, right?

Like, in

He’s a method guy, but also he’s like super into, like, dungeons and dragons and science fiction. He didn’t want the fast and furious franchise to be the thing that defined him. He’s he has definitely accepted that to be clear. Yeah. But he wanted the Riddick movies to be the things that, like, wore the movies that people knew him because the Riddick movies were the ones he was excited about because he’s a weird sci fi nerd.

I think to your question, it’s not who knows whether the Biden endorsement truly hurt him, Duane Johnson’s artistic or economic prospects. Maybe he’s not doing quite as well as one might have hoped fifteen years ago, certainly from an artistic perspective, we’re not the only ones who have commented on the fact that he seems to really like working with directors who are very mediocre. Like this seems to be an intentional choice to, I’m gonna only make mediocre movies that are just like allow me to be the rock, the brand rather than making any kind of thing. That is super interesting on itself is basically the opposite of what we’ve seen from someone like Dave Batista who deeply does not want to be a solar big brand. He just wants to be a good actor in good movies.

Right. You’ll love to see it. It’s the exact opposite thing. And so the rock I think is doing a little a reset. This is probably part of that reset.

And what that tells you is maybe or maybe maybe the Biden thing didn’t deter did not particularly pay off. Right? Like, we it’s hard to know, like, in the sense that, I mean, I guess we have some Netflix data on on those thirty second click equivalents or whatever the crap our metric is and we can see how the rocks movies have done, but it’s hard to know exactly what kind of impact that sort of thing. Does, but it tells you that he is trying to shed that persona. And I believe I’m actually not able to bring it up right now in a search, but I believe Sonny, listen, maybe you guys have heard this too.

That there’s been some rumblings that the rock w that Duane Johnson wants to get away from working with these sort of like competent but but like ultimately pretty generic directors and wants to try some more interesting stuff because he kinda realizes that in Hollywood, if you don’t make good movies

But then why go this tactic. Right? I mean, this is this is a move. There I don’t wanna say that people who are concerned about sort of over consensus and silencing and our politics are all this way. But there definitely is a, like, anti wokeness as the, you know, the last refuge of mediocrity.

And that’s what this feels like to me. Right? It’s like and maybe, you know, maybe the stracean reading of this is correct. And it’s like a sort of deep operation to, like, not have to endorse Biden again. We’ll also, like, attempting to undermine the anti Biden politics.

But This is not the move. I think that one would make if you were trying to have a more interesting artistic career because it’s gonna brand him as a, if you’ll pardon my language, a Jackass, some of the people that he’d wanna work with.

Peter, I agree that you’re right though. I think that that is an intention with what he is he is doing here politically. Again, Duane Johnson has an almost preternatural ability to read a room. He’s extremely I think he’s extremely sensitive to what the actual moment is. And this is and this is why if I again, if I’m the Biden people and I’m looking at this not through the lens of Kfabe and not through the the Stroussian WWE reading, but just as like what does this say about his read on where the public is?

I’m a little bit worried. I’m a little bit I’m a little bit freaked out by it. That said, I mean, look, I I don’t think I don’t think the endorsement of Biden hurt him at all. I think the endorsement of Biden made perfect sense because everybody was endorsing Biden. It’s not like there was there was no you you it wasn’t obviously

a crazy move at the time, but what this tells us is that he’s it. He wants to move on and not be yoked to that going forward.

I think he wants to I think he wants to move away from being like the guy that people talk about as potential president. Yeah. I think that’s definite part definitely part of this because I think he was, like, kinda interested in that, like, oh, maybe I could be president. But then I think

he also I think he’s and then he, like, spent ten minutes thinking about what it would be like to be president.

He looked at the last ten years of American life and was like, oh, that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone. And and and I think that I think that’s a very I think that’s a very explicit part of this that we haven’t really talked about, but I think he is moving away from that And I think he wants to not be the guy. I think he wants to not be the wrestler. Everyone asks, like, what do you think about politics

anymore? For sure.

Which I don’t blame him at all because that it’s but but the other thing here is I don’t think there’s any real case to be made that the endorsement of Biden hurt him with audiences. I mean, Red notices like the most one of the most watched Netflix movies of all time. Regardless of how good or bad it is, There’s some there’s

a market for amiable garbage.

Nothing. There’s neither here nor there.

Definitely remember at least one shot from that movie.

I don’t. And I saw it in the theater. And and so the the other thing is you can look at his, you know, we say like Black Adam underperformed and it did. But you know what is the highest grossing DC movie in the last five years or whatever? Blackout.

It’s it’s he is actually the high watermark. Of the end of this whole this whole thing. So I, you know, I I, like, I don’t I don’t think you could credibly make a case that had hurt him. I think he just wants to I think he wants to just get away from being the politics wrestler guy. Sure.

He wants to be a popular entertainer and he has realized that politics are inherently divisive. And that’s not the subtext. That is the text of the remarks that

he gave it. Right? Is the takeaway above the subtext.

Yes. The takeaway was that it caused an incredible amount of division. And right? And so this is why he’s not doing a different endorsement. This is why he’s not, getting into, you know, sort of making himself politically political differently.

He’s not gonna like, I’m not doing

that anymore. I’m gonna do I’m gonna wrestle guys and I’m gonna be a movie star because that’s the thing I care

But at the same time, you know, part of what I find sort of irritating about this sort of dumb anti woke churn is that, like, there’s a totally viable model for being a popular, you know, not terribly political action star. Right? I mean, Mark Walberg does a lot of sort of I do stuff with military. Like, this was this was part of the reason that, you know, Johnson was able to kind of pull together this buzz as presidential candidate because his thing was I’m a pretty popular actor, and I really like the troops, and I broke that we killed our Psalmov bin Laden. Like, it’s very easy to go back to doing the, like, non partisan support the military stuff.

Without doing something that’s just sort of obviously dumb and not productive.

But it’s but it’s also impossible to do that while also playing Footsie for president. Because there’s no there’s no there’s no third party.

But when he can just say, like, you know, I’ve been really flattered that people talked about for that. For ten years. I this is the way that I think I can do the most good right now. If I have something to say, you’ll hear about it. Again, I just I don’t think it’s that hard.

I don’t think this level of complexity is necessary for the rebrand he wants, which should involve him making some better movies, and then doing, you know, nonpartisan charitable work. Like, if he wants to be the guy who’s, like, all about, like, unity, he and Ken Burns can team up to promote Burns’s own initiative in time for or burns a documentary about the American Revolution. Right? Like, there are just easy options available to him here that don’t require him to do the most boring thing possible.

He couldn’t run for president on the no labels ticket.

Right.

They couldn’t pick a candidate.

I wanna I would just wanna point out that you said the least boring thing he could do is endorse the Ken Burns documentary. That’s I just wanna I wanna, like Yeah.

Sorry. The least, like, controversial. I was like the most predictable thing he could do. The American Revolution is gonna be good.

I’m sure it’ll be Greg Ken Burns’s fantastic film I’m

just He’s been using a lot of Trent Resiner for his score.

Sounds great. Stop it.

He’s working. He he did a bunch of work with Ryan Giddens for the revolution too.

Alright. Alright. Do we think is it a controversy or an controversy that Dwayne the Rock Johnson is deciding to set out the twenty twenty four presidential election, Alyssa?

It’s a controversy that Duane Johnson has wasted so much of his his his inherent talent.

Peter, it’s a controversy that he endorsed Biden the first time. Even though, yes, of course, was obvious and not, not a stupid idea in the moment. It’s like that stuff, that stuff will come back and, like, and stick with you. And he should have known that at the time. His brand manager should have known that at the time.

He didn’t, and now he’s finally realizing it’s not a controversy that he is pulling away from politics it’s a controversy that it was ever involved in them.

It’s a controversy in the real world. It’s a controversy in the wrestling world where he’s gonna rebrand the people’s elbow cancel elbow. He’s gonna drop it on folks, and it’s gonna be it’s gonna that’s it. You’re canceled. That’s what he’s gonna yell into the mics once he’s you’re can’t

Is one of them gonna be canceled and the other one’s gonna be culture?

Cancel. Woke. I I’m you can’t see me. I’m tapping my my elbows here on the because I’m doing the people’s elbow. Alright.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the cameras rolling.

Alright. Make sure. That sounds pretty communist to me.

I feel like I feel like if he really leaned into the, like, I’m if he went, like, full sergeant slaughter, like, really, like, created a whole costume and everything. Remember, he was a, you guys don’t never mind. It doesn’t matter. We’re gonna we’re gonna gotta move on. I don’t wanna get deep into the weeds of WWE lore.

Make sure to swing by Bulwark Plus on Friday for our bonus episode. Don’t wanna miss it. And now on to the main event. Monkey man. Monkey man.

Dev Patel co wrote directed and stars in monkey man. A mumbaya based action revenge movie that has been described as Indian John Wick. Now Patel himself bristles at this shorthand. And for reasons, I’ll get into it in a moment. It doesn’t actually work because it’s not really a stylistic quick knock off either.

But as far as descriptors go, as far as elevator pitches go, it’s good enough for government work. After all, we get the neon lit bike club night fight scene. Right? That’s John Wiki. That’s kinda John Wiki.

It’s his revenge movies. Somebody dies. He’s gotta take revenge. John Wiki, whatever. It’s worked.

It’s Don’t

you mean it’s Wick Ed?

Wick it’s Wickian. It’s Wickian. It’s Wicken. Alright. The setup here is fairly simple.

Badguys, destroyed Patel’s unnamed character’s village. I’m just gonna call him Patel instead of kid or moon Bobby ball. Monkey or whatever.

Call him.

I’m just gonna call him Patel. And now he wants to get revenge on the bad guys. He has spent last few years throwing fights in underground boxing matches all while working his way up into a position at a night club. He’s moving his way up the ladder. He’s he’s helping with the dealing the drugs, and he’s he’s waiting the tables, and he’s he’s getting, you know, the upset about call girls being hit on.

It’s it’s he’s just, you know, good guy. He’s a good guy. And then, and then he finds the police chief who burnt down his house. And then he can’t pull the trigger, and then we spend an hour watching flashbacks over and over again, and then we see Patel completing his training at a temple run by transgendered Chiva priests, And then we we then he they they teach him that he needs something more than personal revenge to fight for. He needs to be larger than himself.

And he needs to become the monkey man. That’s the path to righteous violence. And then an hour or so later, we are right back where we started thirty minutes into the movie. This is not an efficient film is what I’m saying. It is not an efficient film, and that is a problem.

That’s a problem for a movie like this. There’s there’s no reason for this to be nearly two hours long. It goes on forever. I could not care less about the political subtext, involved not interesting to me. The family revenge portion is more telling, but, like, the emotional beats are so repetitive.

I lost track of the number of times we have shots of Patel as a kid wandering through the jungle with a smokey haze where he’s seeing and looking lovingly at his mother. I Alright. We get it. You could do that once or twice. Do it.

That’s fine. That but you don’t gotta keep doing it. You don’t. And then eventually, it just all had the opposite effect of what was intended. I was sitting there like a mill house watching the itchy and scratchy episode with Pucci.

I was getting Twitchier and Twitchier. I was like, when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory? Eventually, they do get to the fireworks factory. And once they do, it’s pretty pretty solid. The action is solid.

It’s not fluid or, dance like, like, like, John Wick, it’s it’s not quite stitched together in an editing room either. There’s some good stuff. There’s a lot of shaky handheld footage, which does a good job conveying the manic energy of the fights, but also kind of obscures the choreography. The one thing they absolutely have going for them in this movie is that it is pleasingly brutal. These fight They the knife work, very intense.

The punches feel pretty real for the most part. The weight to get there was almost worth it. I have to say I’m a little flummoxed by some of the, like, really vociferous praise for this flick that it got coming out of South by Southwest. It’s good. It’s good.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s it’s okay. I mostly enjoyed it. It’s it’s fine. It’s fine.

It’s not without its flaws. I mean, it’s not great. It’s very much first directorial effort from an actor who still needs to work a bit on blocking in pacing. Patel delivers a solid performance, and he really does a direct actor as well. That’s his biggest strength here.

He understands how to use guys like Charlie Sykes’ Copley, who plays a crooked deranged South African fight promoter. This is the year of the deranged South African villain, by the way. I we we one in beekeeper. We got one here. We need we need a third for a trend piece, and then I’m gonna write it.

Peter, what did you make of monkey man?

I liked this movie. I didn’t quite love it. I had some of the same complaints as you, but maybe, angled just a little bit differently. So the political subtext did not bother me as much. Though, I I would not say I am super up to the up to date on the intricacies of Indian politics.

I think a lot of that stuff worked anyway because even if you don’t totally understand the particulars and the ways that this bounces off of, you know, complaints about increased, about Modi’s India and the way that Modi has sort of taken India from being a somewhat more secular com country to being a more religious country and sort of taken sides and things, and and really irritated some people and just in a bunch of ways there. Even if you don’t understand that, I think that this movie works in terms of the justice of it, right? Which is important in a revenge film in an action film just in the sense of like the justice of John Wick is they killed his dog. Now he gets to do anything they want to him. Right?

There’s a kind of inherent justice to it. And this movie presents the justice case reasonably well even if you don’t understand the political implications or you know, what what it’s trying to say about present day India. I think the movie’s bigger problem is the pacing and you talked about how how it’s too long. I think that’s exactly right. This is a nearly two hour or by some counts slightly over two hour film, and it really should have been edited down to about an hour and forty five minutes or so.

The biggest problem with the pacing comes in that third quarter of the movie. So this movie is sort of builds in the first hour. To a big action set piece in which, the kid monkey man, Dev Patel, tries to take out his target and he fails. And then in failing, he is injured and wounded and sort of has to rebuild himself and we basically have the Rocky arc of Oh, here’s the the training montage, except the the training montage is delayed so that we can get something like twenty full minutes. Of backstory, political montage that isn’t even really narrative in nature.

You’re not like witnessing scenes that develop and sort of and and have a propulsive narrative logic to them or or an arc. They don’t move. They’re just sort of like here’s what it felt like to be a little kid who was in a who was living in this world and came to be rageful at the elites, the pow the people in power who were harming my people and and and making my country worse. Right? And it’s just very vibey and it’s way too long.

That whole sequence just should have been edited down to, I mean, probably, you know, under ten minutes, under six minutes, really. Like, we it we I get the idea. I know what’s going on. And then get us back to the part where he’s, where he is, retraining himself and becoming hard again and fighting against the, you know, the, doing the the sandbag, hits. Right?

Like, and that that bit works actually I think pretty well but it takes it takes about twenty minutes into that third quarter of the movie in order to get there and the pacing is just is just not right. And then, and you combine that with the fact that it does take a little while to get to the really big action scene that is sort of in the middle of the movie. I I liked the first hour of this movie better than I liked the second hour in part because that third quarter. It’s that third quarter that is the real problem because it’s It is a it is a giant pause on the already fairly minimal plot and narrative action here and so it just It takes us up to the point where the big thing happens and then it stops for twenty minutes so that it can tell you why it’s happening and what the reason for this movie existing is. And so it’s it it is a it is not a well paced movie in that sense.

That said, I thought that some of the shaky cam stuff and some of the camerawork in this movie actually worked really well, especially in the first half an hour or so before we get to the first big action sequence. There there is some really beautiful low light kind of high contrast, intense color photography of of the Indian slums and of the sort of the Indian streets that that is just not like anything that you I won’t say not I won’t say it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before but it’s not the way you what you typically see in a in a mean spirited action movie like this. It’s just not typically what you see on a big screen at all because it really sort of takes you into this ad hoc world of people living on the edge and living on the fringes of Indian life and shows that to you in a way that is gritty without being unnecessarily kind of, just sort wallowing in it. Right? And and it gives you this in a way that I think helps to sell the kind of helps to sell the justice of of the revenge here.

Right? This is who he’s fighting for. These are the people who are his cause. Right? And this movie is about accounting for the gap between the people in the really nice cars who are driving through the streets ignoring all of these people on the street living in boxes living in Swaddler and in poverty.

And the movie shows that to you continually, not just once or twice, not just to establish it for a minute or two upfront. But that whole first hour just sort of lets you into that world in a way that I really found fascinating and there’s some great just some great long tracking shots some really beautiful light work, and and then every time you meet a character, even if it’s somebody who you just see for, a minute or two who barely has any lines, like the guy who collects the money at the, you know, gambling on the fighters. Right? Like, there’s a guy who’s, like, he takes the money and then gives you the money if you win or you know, whatever. Like, you don’t even meet that guy for very long, but he, like, has a distinctive character.

The little kid who Dev Patel meets at the bar. It’s really nice distinctive character. Without a whole lot of screen time. And so I I think a lot of this movie works. I think the action scenes are basically pretty good and they’re especially pretty good for how low the budget was.

There’s a ten million dollar movie in, you know, twenty twenty four dollars that makes it half or less than what the first John Witt cost in, what was it? Twenty twelve, twenty fourteen dollars?

I think Netflix spent thirty million on it, in universal water for ten.

Oh, okay. So Netflix alright. So I I saw ten million dollars being reported, but even still, this is what this is John Wick money, but, you know, adjusted for inflation so probably less than what they spent on John Wick. It really does look pretty good and it is pretty masterful for somebody who comes from an acting background rather than a stunt background who’s never directed before. Like this stuff just works on its own.

It’s not John Wick level game changing but it but I I was taken with these action sequences.

Yeah. They’re fine. Lisa, what did you make of monkey man?

So I think ignoring the politics of this movie is a mistake for two reasons. First, it’s a really interesting window on something that’s happening in Hollywood that we’re not talking about very much. And second, I think it actually explains some of the movie’s significant problems. So back up for a second, we’ve talked a lot on this podcast about China’s relationship with Hollywood. And the extent to which you know, the American entertainment industry spent the better part of two decades kind of chasing Chinese audiences only to be really shut out.

Yeah. And have compromised itself in the process. Right? There has been a there have been a lot of instances of American companies censoring what can be said or shown on screen in movies in an attempt to get past Chinese sensors and in front of this audience who ended up kind of projecting these movies. But we have not talked a lot about Hollywood’s relationship with India.

And that is also a or at least standard time in the industry hope that will be an important relationship. You know, Disney, for example, some of the fluctuations in Disney plus subscriptions have been due to Disney either landing or losing out on cricket deals that made it an, you know, an interesting target for Indian audiences. That sort of deal with dot star was something that didn’t quite work out for them, I think in the way that they expected it to. Netflix, which, you know, originally was doing monkey man. Has sort of famously not been in business with China in a way that’s allowed them to do things like the very blunt depictions of the cultural revolution at the beginning of three body problem, which it’s running right now, but they do have business in India.

And there have been questions about you know, pressure from the Union government, pressure from the Saudi government where they also work. So I think you can’t talk about this movie without talking about sort of the interesting potential relationship that Hollywood would like to have with India, which, of course, has its own you know, huge blockbuster movie industry in a way that I think China was very much trying to kind of learn from. It had developed, you know, Bollywood has been a huge deal in India for a long time. So there’s that sort of business crosscurrent there.

And in particular, a big action movie.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, the success of RRR last year, for example, with American audience.

Well, and and and a lot of that is some of that is coming over the United States. And there’s, you know, the the reason I actually really like universal spending ten million bucks to pick this up is because it’s a low cost, medium reward style movie if they can get some passover with the, Indian diaspora audiences who show up for things like r r r.

Yeah. Then coming to the text of the movie itself, I don’t know a lot about Indian politics. I want to be really clear about that before going into this. But know, this is a movie that was shot during the pandemic under, I think, some pretty harrowing circumstances got held for a while. Jordan Peels monkey Paul picked it up, and is sort of the kind of booster behind it.

And This movie, you know, so part of this movie is about, you know, Deb Patel’s character’s family being forcibly displaced by government forces for the construction of what is sort of being sold as a temple. Whatever it is, it’s a facility that is masterminded by this religious guru. This movie comes To sweatshop. Yeah. This movie comes out right after the Modi backed government participates in the celebration of the opening of a major new Hindu temple that is built on the site of land that used to be a mosque.

It’s like it is literally coming out. On the heels of, you know, and I I have to imagine that even though monkey man was made before this temple complex opened, the you know, the fight over the Temple Complex has been going on for a long time. Right? So it is it is not at all subtle in its parallel to very proximate events in Indian politics. The movie’s political party is the, like, the sovereign party, which, you know, it’s not directly named after the BJP, the, you know, the hindu nationalist party that Narendrabodie is a part of, you know, the movie echoes.

There are some discussions about whether the use of In the movie, the sovereign party is sort of dominant color. Is this like reddish or an orange just red reddish orange? There’s some questions about whether that was toned to be more red, so it wouldn’t be so obviously about the BJP. But it’s about the rise of a religious nationalist party. I mean, it is way more radical about politics in India as I understand them than any, the sort of political movies that come out America are about American politics in any given year.

We’re discussing civil war on an upcoming edition of this podcast, so that may change. But This is one of the most sort of bluntly radically political movies that I have seen in theaters in a very long time. But I also think that that ends up being the key to why the movie kinda falls apart in its pacing and its escalation because, and it okay if I discuss spoilers for a second? I think it’s No.

None of us have seen the movie. I

think that’s fine.

I try we try to be careful because our listeners haven’t heard things. So As the movie progresses, the monkey man character sort of starts up working for Queenie who is this club operator with connections to this political party who works sort of Canon fist with Raja, with Rona Singh, the police captain who burned his family’s his family’s village and killed his mother. And then at the top of the pyramid, there is this sort of you know, religious cult leader. Who again, you know, there’s this there is not a, faith specifically mentioned, but he is certainly coded more hindu than he is coated Muslim. There’s also a political figure who’s being elected prime minister.

And the movie just kinda skips over him. He, you know, we know that he is the person who’s being elected. He’s being who’s who the religious figure is campaigning for. But he is never characterized in the way Queenie, Ronasing, or this religious figure are. And in fact, De Patel’s character explicitly lets him go during the sort of final action sequence.

He sort of spares him. And you know, I suspect that it would have been a lot to be like, yes, our main character is going to murder our nerd and remotes stand in. Right? Like that. But it denies us And the, you know, the movie’s inability to sort of build out this political world as a whole denies us the kind of third escalation where you take away some of the flashbacks, but have us, you know, work up through Queenie, through Ronasing, who turns out, like, not to be the final boss, And then, you know, if you understand that you’re getting to this pull these political and religious figures at the top of the pyramid in the same way that you’re like, John Wick is fighting his way up to the governance of the high table.

You both, you know, if you spend less time on the flashbacks and more time building that world, and are actually able to sort of confront the political figure, you have a much more traditional, you know, back half escalation that would also make the fact that he’s sort of initially defeated by Rona saying feel like less of a complete repeat in the third act. Right? If you if he’s defeated, and goes back and sort of discovers that there is more at work here, and he actually needs to work his way higher up the ladder. Then you get, I think, a much more satisfying. Yeah.

But also vastly more politically incendiary movie than even the quite blunt and harsh political movie you do get.

I got the sense look, again, I I don’t know anything about Indian politics. And and again, frankly, I I don’t I don’t actually care that much. About it because the the the reason because we have

to, like, read a book and, you know, I didn’t.

Well, now, the the well, the way the movie works though is it works the the general idea of revenge works because of the of the ideas and the and the character. And like, that’s fine. That’s all well and good. I just I just don’t care that much. The the but what the way I kind of read the the treatment of the prime minister there was that he is essentially just a figurehead that he is not actually important.

That’s why he gets I don’t think I don’t think he was spared out of fear of offending Modi necessarily maybe. I don’t know. But I got the sense he was he was spared because he is not actually important. He is just He’s he’s neither the muscle nor the brains nor the money. He’s just the guy that people vote for.

So he doesn’t matter.

Maybe it still feels just like a hole in the the world building to me.

So I I I guess I’m kind of in between you guys and that I I think you are correct, Sonny, that that is the way the movie presents it to us, but that doesn’t mean that the movie that the filmmakers didn’t make the choice to present it that way. In order to ensure that they didn’t have to have a structure where you, you know, kill the kill a major political leader at the end of the film. Yep. But I I think you’re totally right that the escalation issues are are are real there and typically you would have had the rebirth and revision, you know, sort of the the rebirth and retraining sequence come a little bit earlier and then the end of the second act would have been killing who you think is the you know, the final villain who turns out not to be and then you enter a deeper and stranger world and this movie doesn’t give us that. You know, one of the sort of screenplay rules for this sort of thing is that you are the third act is supposed to have a definitive change of venue.

There’s also supposed to be typically, you want a big reveal at the end of the second act that shows that the the the the character and our our protagonist in some sense had things wrong a little bit. There’s more going on here. Movie doesn’t have that.

And this is where if the flashbacks led somewhere other than just sort of a deepening of our sense of our heroes, trauma, then it would be a much more effective sort of mystery puzzle.

And you mentioned since you mentioned the beekeeper, we should just compare the two. I like both of these movies, and I think they both work in in similar ways, though, not exactly the same, obviously. But the beekeeper has that escalation. Yeah. Well, it In fact, has it does it really well.

It’s kind of crazy. It’s self consciously, like nutty in the way that it escalates. But it absolutely just goes all the way to the top in a way that’s like, okay. That’s wow. Alright.

You’re this is the president’s son and that president is

The president’s fail Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Now, the end of the movie is, like, in the not in the White House, but it’s in what are we gonna call this Camp David or, I mean, you know, in one of, like, some presidential retreat

around Boston something or other. Right?

Yeah. But it’s not right.

So it’s not an official, but it’s like the president’s you know, vacation house on the beach. Where you’re

about to have a vacation?

And it’s just like, okay. We’re go we really are going all the way to the top and that all gives the movie this this great narrative propulsion. It’s ridiculous. It’s totally ridiculous, and that’s one of the reasons the movie can get away with it is it doesn’t feel like a really direct and just sort of like here’s an op ed about why this political figure is bad kind of thing, but it also allows for the protagonist to actually get somewhere and for the story to move and for that third act to feel Like, it’s not just a repeat, but he wins this time.

Yeah. Alright. So what do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on monkey man. Alyssa.

Probably thumbs up. I’m excited to see what Dev Patel does next.

Dater. Thumbs up. Yeah.

It’s a good directorial debut. Most good directorial debuts have some issues. I think this movie has some issues, but that doesn’t make it not good.

Yeah. Thumbs up. It’s it’s it’s good. It’s it’s fine. Let’s go see it in another theater to where the words meant to be seen.

I agree with that. And I mean, I would also just say it’s good that this movie is playing in theaters if I understand correctly. This was as we said finance by Netflix, the original plan was for it to not be shown in theaters broadly and the reason that jordan peele bought it was he saw it and was like, I want this to be seen on a big screen. It’s a big screen movie and it is.

Alright. That’s it for today’s show. Many thanks for engineering engineer Jonathan Last without whom this program would sound much worse. Make sure to swing by Bulwark Plus on Friday for our bonus episode. Tell your friends, a strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences if we don’t grow, we’ll die.

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