Monkey Man

I’m really upset that I didn’t enjoy this and also kinda confused at the unanimous praise. I swear this happens where I have so many issues with a film but it feels like nobody shares this opinion.

I have immense love for anyone that makes films which are doused in culture and specifically culture I’m not familiar with as it makes for such a more engaging experience and it’s cool to leave an action film more informed on a culture as well.

Dev Patel clearly has poured a lot of love and passion into this project and you can feel this in the film as a whole but more specifically in his intense embodiment of this character I mean even physically you’re able to see the effort he’s put into this role.

I mean sadly that’s where my compliments end, the film is a mess. I mean for one, for an action film you want to be immersed in the action and the film makes so many choices that makes this really hard. It lacks a complete sense of spatial awareness, so you’re unable to keep track of what’s going on most of the time. This is in part to the horrendous decision to shoot the majority of this film with shaky cam, pair this with some of the most egregiously horrible editing I’ve seen recently and it becomes unbearable to watch, I just found myself zoning out of action scenes.

I mean it’s clearly a choice made to show his inability at the beginning as the scenes get more steady as the film goes on but I really was checked out by the time scenes got better. For a film rating like this with the violence in said scenes it should feel visceral but between the way it’s shot, edited and the horrendous sound mixing and choice of songs it takes away from this leaving a lasting impact on you at all.

I really want to say how much the editing annoyed me cause it was truly all over the place. When doing an action scene and there’s too many cuts you lose any real impact at all. I mean there was some good editing here and there but given good editing stood out it really shows how bad the rest of the film was.

I enjoyed the cultural aspects and learning about the transgender people and was a cool inclusion but I also thought this was so weakly written. Like drawing a line between what he was and these people was literally so surface level. Ok they’re both marginalised like is that all we’re gonna get seriously? I mean as far as writing goes it’s all a bunch of cliches which considering I wasn’t into the action I found it hard to like any of this film

Patel seems lovely and I’m glad people are enjoying this film but man it was wesk