Monkey Man Colors Action Movies with Violent Genderqueer Catharsis

* Content warning for general discussions of violence. Spoilers for Monkey Man (2024) too!

We love to see others get absolutely beat up. 

In 2023, action was the highest-grossing movie genre at the box office, with movies like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, and John Wick: Chapter 4 placing in the top 15 highest-grossing films of that year.

Action movies are widely beloved for the exhilarating fight sequences unique to the genre. While horror might overlap with action’s occasional gore, and adventure might overlap with action’s generally exciting quality, the action genre is distinct in its specific showcase of how fights physically happen.

Audiences are treated to the thrill of impressive displays of firepower and weapons, masterful hand-to-hand combat skills, and sometimes, even the occasional telekinetic blast that melts minds and blows people to bits. Pick your poison, and along the way, you can bet someone will be shoved off a building or have their legs broken or shot five times in the chest.

With its aggressive and unforgiving nature, would you ever think queerness has a place in the action genre?

Dev Patel certainly does.

More than just a series of brutal combat sequences, Monkey Man recognizes the potential for action movies to give meaning to its carnage, deepening and motivating violence with social critique and commentary. 

The bottom of India’s caste system, sex workers, mothers, and the hijra community—in Monkey Man’s world, which is decidedly ours, the protagonists are deemed to be less than nothing.

By making members of marginalized communities the protagonists of the film, Patel highlights their struggle and how they already are fighters. 

The very best action movies are entertaining because they show an upset of power. The protagonist is going up against something impossible, charging headfirst into a fight they shouldn’t win, yet they do anyway. 

Like the underdog, the protagonists of Monkey Man not only have no power to begin with, but they are beaten into submission at every opportunity. Every moment of violence from the protagonists disrupts this imbalance, seizes back power and control, and breaks free of oppression, thus motivated by something more powerful than the aesthetic and entertainment of popular action movies. 

It creates the sense that they’re not fighting because they’re in an action movie, fighting simply for the sake of it, but because they’ll be killed if they don’t.

So, Patel gives his protagonists an evil that must be destroyed. Fascists, cult leaders, police officers, transphobes—the antagonists are a corruption that must be purged. When the film possesses a familiar kind of antagonism that audiences can identify with in their own lives and realize the necessity for the protagonists to defeat the antagonists, the fight becomes even more satisfying. The physical action of violence can be as compelling as its aggressor and their reasons.

With this foundation, Monkey Man’s use of action, violence, and destruction is a method of liberation from oppression.

In the beginning, the main character, Kid, loses every fight deliberately in fighting rings to earn a living, and then out of inability in his first confrontation with the chief of police, Rana Singh, the man who assaulted and murdered his mother. This culminates in him nearly dying after being chased and shot by the police under the instruction of Baba Shakti, a tyrannical spiritual guru with control over much of the city’s politics.

When the hijra community saves him, he is told by their leader, Alpha, that he has only been fighting to feel pain and lacks purpose. As he recovers from his injuries, he is surrounded by a loving community that pushes him to improve as he remembers who he is. 

After this awakening, galvanized by Baba Shakti’s men attacking one of the hijras, Kid charges into a series of confrontations that feel like a video game hero facing boss fight after boss fight.

On the night of Diwali, a Hindu festival celebrating the triumph of light over darkness, Kid returns to the fighting ring, wins every fight, and uses the money won to pay back the hijra community for taking care of him. 

Righteously bloodthirsty, Kid then confronts the people who burned his village and massacred his people. In the club, he defeats the henchmen with the help of the hijras. In pursuit of Rana, he takes the elevator to the VIP lounge, where he finally defeats him in a fight. To end it all, Kid takes the elevator again to the top of the club, where he confronts and kills Baba Shakti.

As he wins each new fight previously lost, we see a liberated and empowered Kid overcome something greater than himself. He literally ascends closer to the skies, the heavens, and the Gods, climbing every level of hierarchical corruption to purge it.

While his mother is his catalyst, the hijra community is at the center of Kid’s epic hero’s journey. They clarify his purpose and focus his rage into something powerful and meaningful. This decision to place the hijra community in a genre that rarely sees queerness draws similarities between the violence found in action movies and the catharsis of the genderqueer experience.

After tending to his injuries, the hijra community offers Kid a place of rest and rehabilitation. In this calm, a particularly powerful and standout moment happens in the film. 

When Kid is unable to fall asleep despite being offered shelter and love, Alpha counsels him, “I learned that you need to destroy in order to grow. To create space for new life.” Then, Alpha offers Kid a toxic root called Trishul that will “cut him open” and only leave once it is finished teaching him. 

What comes next is an abstract transition into a flashback of his past, a small moment that borders on experimental in a film that has been otherwise standardly dramatic and action in genre so far. Kid rips his chest open to reveal a visual of melting color and beating light. Incomprehensible. Divine.

After this, Kid not only recovers but also becomes stronger. 

There is a training montage where the tabla player uses music to teach Kid how to improve his hand-to-hand combat while everyone else cheers him on. It’s an incredibly exhilarating and joyous scene. But to earn this, he had to destroy himself, and rebuild from the ground up.

There is nothing inherently negative to destruction as a concept, and Dev Patel utilizes it to showcase Kid’s rebirth as a new man and fighter.

When Kid is faced with a second, bigger wave of henchmen, the hijra community comes to his aid, adorned in mesmerizing lehengas and armed with weapons dripping with blood. Their fighting scene is enchantingly musical, more similar to dance than combat, and we are reminded that at its core, violence is an expression of the self.

Destruction is beautiful. Destruction is necessary—destruction is not an enemy of creation but a friend, two sides of the same coin. 

Alpha’s first words to Kid are to describe the beauty of one of the statues in the temple. “Parvati and Shiva. One-half devotion, the other destruction. Male. Female. Neither. Both.” Genderqueerness, a simultaneous experience of creation and destruction, is a divine concept to embrace in order to achieve something better than the evil around us.

Bloodshed and violence could be guns, bloody fists, and broken bones. 

But Dev Patel and Monkey Man urges us to bravely go where the genderqueer experience has, that destruction is a demonstration of the strength and love that comes with liberation and salvation.