Jason Di Rosso interviewed co-writer/director/star Dev Patel back in April 2024. It did not sound appetising at the time but just now became inevitable when I found out Sharlto Copley is in it.
The movie is simply Indian John Wick (2014) with similar aspirations to endless sequels (Gods forbid). This retreat to cliched ultraviolence is annoying as many of the visuals are intriguing and as lush as Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). Many opportunities to dig into exotic ethnographies, even as much as Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) did, are passed over; narrative is too hard or too dead now. Copley does well enough as an impresario for a bare-knuckle brawling enterprise but is hardly ever there and is never consequential. He plays up coming from South Africa (a sort-of reverse Gandhi?) and there are some other fine but brief observations of various Commonwealth/colonised people. And, bravely, the Hindutva. But unfortunately personal revenge is all that's ever on the table in these sorts of movies. The invocation of Indian spirituality and cure-alls was conceptually stale.
On the plus side I learnt that Dev Patel was also brought up on Monkey Magic. Or perhaps not: that presented the monkey-god as a chaos agent who is coerced by Buddha into good works whereas the Hindu Hanuman represents discipline and other things. The movie spent a lot of time (I wish it had been all the time) exploring the diversity of the demimonde of the city (notionally Mumbai?) but passed up the opportunity to go ecstatic like Joyland (2022) or Return to Seoul (2022), or more deeply into the structure of power like Shoshana (2023).
Later I found I've seen more Patel than I had realised: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) of course, but he was also in Chappie (2015) and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023).
Peter Sobczynski: actor yes, director of action movies perhaps not. Manohla Dargis: it never coheres. The sequence where a purse is thieved was good.
