Monkey Man and 21st-Century Indie Action Movies
About half an hour into Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man, the main character, played by Patel, goes to a secret gun shop in the slums of his city. The shop owner pulls out a familiar-looking gun and states, “You like John Wick? I have the same gun from the movie.” Patel asks for something more discreet and is given a .33 caliber revolver instead.
Action movies aren’t like most genres. They’re self-referential, closer to comedies than thrillers or dramas. When a new action movie comes out, you’ll often hear the style of action compared to other action movies. “Oh, they have some big Mission: Impossible stunts.” or “They’re fighting on wires like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” These styles come in waves like the use of shaky cam after the success of The Bourne Identity or the winking sarcasm embraced in the wake of the MCU.
Watching Monkey Man, I struggled to pinpoint where Patel’s inspiration came from. In an interview at SXSW he was asked about the comparisons to John Wick, the indie action style du jour for the past decade. In response, he stated that while he greatly respects the Wick movies, his influences are much more widespread. Monkey Man is “a weird cocktail of all these things I’ve kind of injected into the movie.” I see a movie that is part The Raid style brutal hand-to-hand fights meeting Bollywood bombast and formalism. While the story is sometimes held together with gum and shoelaces, you can feel the director’s intent in the unique visual styling.
Monkey Man is a solid little action movie, so I’d like to present my 21st-century indie action canon in honor of solid little action movies. The criteria is that the estimated budget must be under $20 million. That’s a little higher than most criteria for “indie” movies. But it’s an expensive genre, and finding many micro-budget action movies that have left a mark outside of Hong Kong and Korea is genuinely challenging. So apologies to Mad Max: Fury Road, Mission: Impossible, and any other excellent Hollywood fare that’s left out. This one’s for the little guys. I’ve organized the list chronologically, so hopefully, you can see the development of action styling on a timeline.
Honorable Mentions
Equilibrium: The Matrix meets 1984 sounds like a great concept, but outside the early use of gun-fu, this one is a snoozer. Watch the action scenes on YouTube and call it a day.
Dredd: This one doesn’t qualify! One of the biggest bombs of the century, Dredd grossed $41 million on a $50 million budget. I encourage everyone to go check it out, though, because it kind of rips. This is a good movie that deserved more.
Looper: Another one that just barely misses the cutoff. I’m sad that Rian Johnson is making 800 Knives Out sequels now because his smaller-budget work is genuinely excellent. That being said, the first Knives Out is one of the most entertaining movies of the 21st century, and Rian Johnson should be considered one of our best Hollywood filmmakers.
This film is Predator with werewolves. If that doesn’t sell you on it, nothing will. A platoon of Scottish special forces soldiers are ambushed in a small highlands cottage by a group of werewolves. It stars Grey’s Anatomy’s Kevin McKidd as the wide-eyed private and Game of Thrones’s Liam Cunningham as the lead werewolf. This gonzo action-horror-comedy should be held up with the B-movie greats. Debut director Neil Marshall went on to have an exciting career, making other indie horror/action classics like The Descent and Centurion, both fun movies if you haven’t seen them. Most famously, he directed the two biggest battle episodes in the first few seasons of Game of Thrones, Blackwater and The Watchers on the Wall. Marshall knows how to do action on a budget.
No one does indie action like Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and Korea. If I were to include every action classic under $20 million from those regions, this article would be a book. For that reason, I tried to narrow it down to the most influential on American action cinema. Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy is a movie I refuse to spoil. While Park Chan-wook was highly successful in Korea, Oldboy became a worldwide cult classic. For those who have seen it, it’s most memorable for its brutal third-act twist and stylish camera work. For those who haven’t, you’ve seen dozens of rip-offs of the iconic one-shot hallway fight scene. Movies later in this very list are riffing off of it. I can’t go into much detail without spoilers, so I’ll just say to watch this one, knowing it’s more of a Greek tragedy than an action thriller.
For those of you looking for a good time in your action movies, check out Edgar Wright’s second movie, Hot Fuzz. Like his debut, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz is a comedic send-up of his favorite genres. A buddy cop movie about a London cop uncovering a conspiracy in a sleepy small town may not sound like an explosive setup for an action movie. But Wright’s expert style turns it into a balls-to-the-wall action epic. Its biggest influence in style is the movie it directly references, Point Break. It’s probably my favorite action comedy ever made.
All four Ip Man movies could deserve a place on this list, but I’ll stick to the first one to keep this brief. The film that introduced many action fans to Donnie Yen, Ip Man is about a martial arts master during the invasion of China by the Japanese in 1935. Despite the realistic setting, the action is more akin to the highly choreographed and stylized fighting of The Matrix. There are few emotional scenes in which the eponymous Ip Man laments the destruction of his home and lifestyle. Much like in a musical where emotions can only be expressed through song, in the world of Ip Man, emotion can only be expressed through ballet-like martial arts sequences. This movie rules.
This is probably best known as the movie John Boyega starred in before Star Wars. In terms of tone, this movie borrows heavily from early Edgar Wright. However, writer-director Joe Cornish injects a unique flair into this one. An alien invasion movie about a group of inner-city London kids has a chance to be hollow without proper writing and performances, but that’s not the case here. Through extensive research, including many quotes about aliens that made it directly into the script, Cornish was able to craft a true-to-life tower block alien film.
This is the movie I see the most of in Monkey Man. It’s the classic action trope, “we’re trapped in a building with a bunch of bad guys, and we have to get out.” Except this one combines Oldboy’s ruthless long-take action and Ip Man’s ballet-like execution. Another piece that makes this unique is Pencak Silat, a fighting style native to Indonesia. Monkey Man is imitating a level of brutality in this film. Unlike John Wick or Ip Man, which, even when gruesome, have a level of elegance. The Raid: Redemption does away with any level of sophistication in favor of a straightforward principle. Survival.
Ok, I admit the $20 million number was to let me talk about John Wick. It’s hard to explain the impact Wick has had on the genre. As evidenced in every interview where Dev Patel is asked about JW, this is the go-to comparison for any well-choreographed action movie, even when they actively reject those comparisons as Monkey Man does. Even after three sequels and countless imitators, you have to place yourself in 2014 to realize how unlikely it was that this film became a success. Keanu Reeves’ career was mostly over. Directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch were mostly known for being stunt coordinators on The Matrix. It feels like the type of success that doesn’t happen much anymore. A film that quadrupled its budget through word of mouth and became a streaming/rental cult giant, leading to an entire franchise? The 2020s could never.
This is my favorite of these films and the only one I saw in a theater. There’s something special about coming across a small movie as it’s happening. You feel like you know about something no one else does. The hook of this movie is in the near future, Grey (Logan Marshall-Green), a paraplegic man, is given the ability to walk again by an experimental AI implant. Not only that, he can cede control to the AI, and it gives him the ability to fight while searching for the people who killed his wife and paralyzed him. Without spoilers, this movie has some of the most inventive action sequences of the 21st century. When he cedes control, he still has control of his head, leading to a confused and apologetic Grey systematically destroying the bad guys. Director Leigh Whannell also has some of the most inventive camera work of the decade, which involves connecting a smartphone as a motion tracker to the camera. This is everything I love about indie action: inventive plots and camerawork, extensively choreographed action, and a general sense of love for the genre.
