Tag Archives: Dev Patel

Monkey Man – Movie Review

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TL;DR – An explosive and raw revenge film that leaves nothing in the tank as it explodes in a riot of action.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Disclosure – I paid to watch this film

Warning – Contains scenes that may cause distress.

Kid dressed in a monkey mask.

Monkey Man Review –

When it comes to the Revenge genre, they can be a bit hit-and-miss. You have to get the audience to sympathise with your protagonist because if they don’t, well then all that violence starts looking bad. The best example of this in the modern era, John Wick, a film which gets name-checked here, and is an excellent example of doing this right. Well, today, we might be able to add a new entry to that list.

So to set the scene, we open with a mother telling her son about the legend of Hanuman. But in the present, that boy does not have a name. He is Kid/Bobby/Monkey Man (Dev Patel) who spends a lot of time throwing cage matches for Tiger (Sharlto Copley) wearing a monkey mask. It is a brutal occupation, but it gets Kid the money to enact his plan, starting with getting into the ground floor of Queenie’s (Ashwini Kalsekar) very illegal but very popular entertainment business. Because Kid has a mission, and that is to bring pain to the people who cause his family harm.

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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar – Movie Review

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TL;DR – A fascinating literary turducken that captivates you.  

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this film.

A writers writing room.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar Review –

In the last week, we have looked at first The Rat Catcherand thenPoison, two fascinating adaptations of Roald Dahl’s short stories by Wes Anderson. It was at this point that I discovered that they were from a group of four that were released, and I had missed the first two. Well, that can not do, so we got back to the start with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which may have given some critical context for the ones that followed.

So to set the scene, we open with ‘a writer’ (Ralph Fiennes) explaining their process of getting ready to write when he introduces us to Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch). Henry is a rich man and one of the many useless rich people floating around like seaweed in the world. But Henry liked to bet. So, on one wet and dreary day, he drifted through a grand house till he came across a peculiar book in the library, A Report on Imdad Khan: The Man Who Sees Without His Eyes by Dr. Z.Z. Chatterjee, dated December 1935, Calcutta. Henry was immediately engrossed with the tale.  

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Poison – Movie Review

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TL;DR – Tense, engaging, and captivating.    

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this film.

the bungalow.

Poison Review –

After watching The Rat Catcher last night, I discovered it was not just a one-off, with Wes Anderson producing several of Roald Dahl’s short stories. With that in mind, I needed to see if they were all as absurdly compelling as the first, and I jumped into Poison.  
                          
It was midnight when Timber Woods (Dev Patel) drove home, trying not to wake his roommate. He should not have bothered because Harry (Benedict Cumberbatch) was still awake. Perplexed, Woods stuck his head in to see how he was when a barely audible whisper sang out ‘Help!‘.  

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The Green Knight – Movie Review

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TL;DR – Visually visceral, narratively interesting, and almost entirely engaging. 

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is a post-credit scene

Disclosure – I paid for the Amazon Prime subscription that viewed this movie.

The Green Knight. Image Credit: Amazon Prime.

The Green Knight Review –

Everyone has a narrative style that they are just a sucker for, it could be road trip movies or WW2 war films, or like me, it is taking myths from the old and reinterpreting in a modern context. This can be the bombasticness of Greek Legend, the sharpness of Norse Legend, or, as we get today, the weirdness of Arthurian Mythology.

So to set the scene, we start the film with a bucket of water in the face as Gawain (Dev Patel) is woken up in a brothel by his lover Essel (Alicia Vikander). Gawain might be hungover, but it is Christmas morning, and Gawain has duties to attend to. While his Mother (Sarita Choudhury) stays at home, Gawain heads to the keep to the feast of King Arthur (Sean Harris) and Queen Guinevere (Kate Dickie). However, a stranger on horseback arrived during the feast, a man made of bark and leaves, the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson). Walking up to the King, he lays out a challenge, and Gawain is the only one to take up the charge.

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Movie Review – Hotel Mumbai

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TL;DR – This is an incredible, violent, and emotionally visceral film that will grab you in the first frame and not let go  

Score – I honestly don’t know how to score this.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Hotel Mumbai. Image Credit: Screen Australia.

Review –

In a now previous life, I taught international relations to university students. This is a large discipline and one of the areas we looked at was terrorism, which happens to be one of the most pressing security issues in the modern world, or not, it’s complicated. All of this meant that when I walked into the theatre to review this film I thought I had a pretty good handle on what I was about to see, as I was quite familiar with the 2008 Mumbai Attacks, and well I could not have been more wrong.

So to set the scene, we open with a boat slowly making its way into one of the many harbours on the Mumbai shoreline. On the boat are eight well-dressed young men who could be there for work in the financial capital of India, but immediately you know that is not the case. Each of them carries a large duffel bag and they are listing to someone give them instructions, directing them to different landmarks across the city. Meanwhile, across the city everyone else is just going through their day as normal, Arjun (Dev Patel) is trying to get his dastaar perfect as he gets ready for work at the Taj Hotel, Zahara (Nazanin Boniadi), her husband David (Armie Hammer), and their nanny Sally (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) are arriving at the hotel after a long flight and everyone is racing to get the room ready for her as her mother is a VIP, and the hotel head chef Hemant (Anupam Kher) is just trying to work out how to get everything done in such a short time. None of them knows the hell that is heading for them.

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Movie Review – Lion

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TL;DR – A beautiful story of loss, exploitation, grief, and trying to find out what home means, in the absence of any real information of where it could be.

Score – 4.5 out of 5 stars

Lion. Image Credit: Transmission Films.

Review –

It might be one of those universal experiences, you’re walking through a shopping centre, theme park, city street, etc. with your parents and then you look up and realise you don’t know where they are. That feeling of being lost as a real and palpable fear and thankfully for most of us it short lived. However, this is not the case for Saroo, indeed for Saroo it was not a momentary fear, for him it was a life changing event. Lion tells the story of Saroo Brierley (Sunny Pawar & Dev Patel) who one day after working in rural India with his brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), joins him on a train ride to a nearby settlement so Guddu can find some night work for them to help their mother Kamla (Priyanka Bose) who works as a labourer to make ends meet. Then Saroo ends up getting stuck on a train which is not going to the next station, but instead travelling 1500km to Calcutta, a place where no one speaks the same language, and as you are five years old as far as you know your mum’s name is ‘mum’. This is a heartbreaking tale of loss, exploitation, and the struggle to find what home means. Now due to the nature of the film, its structure and the very nature that it is based off a true story it becomes quite hard to talk about aspects of the film without discussing the second half of the film. So for this reason from here on into the end, a SPOILER warning is now in place.

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Movie Review – Chappie

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TL;DR – This is in many respects a flawed film, but I could not help but love it.

Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars

Chappie. Image Credit: Sony.

Review –

Chappie is a film with a lot of faults and I know it is a film that a lot of people dislike, but I just can’t help but like it. The basic premise of the film is that in an attempt to reduce the crime rate in Johannesburg the police purchased a fleet of policing robots ‘scouts’ from an American company Tetravall. However, the robots programmer Deon Wilson (Dev Patel) has discovered something more, true AI before everything goes pear shaped.

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