Violence is Boring and We Know It

And we won't admit it

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Yesterday, my younger daughter and I went to see Dev Patel’s new film Monkey Man. We both love Dev Patel, and if you haven’t seen his performance in The Green Knight, I cannot recommend the film enough. It’s a true masterpiece.

Why am I here and not back in The Green Knight?

I was interested in Monkey Man because early reviews focused on the violence and “gore,” and as is often promised, “this time it’s different.” Spoiler: it’s not different. It’s boring. And I think it’s time we all admit this: violence on film and television is perpetually boring because it’s gratuitous, performative, and rote filler offered as an excuse for artistic content. Every punch in the face is just another punch in the face. Every faceless movie extra felled by a Wickian gunshot is just another split-second, meaningless body. And no matter how often contemporary critics try to attach such work to artistry, ballet, or “gun-fu” ( a real term), there is no such thing—violence on screen is the emptiest of content calories, and we consume them endlessly (as I did last evening, though I told them to hold the butter on my popcorn).

The reviews I’ve read amount to nothing more than performative and low-standard culture, making arguments that Dev Patel is doing something unconventional by writing himself as an action hero, one who is not bulked up and one who offers non-white representation in the genre—as if the punches, kicks, and stabbing differ based on the size and appearance of the person delivering them. They don’t. You could replace Patel in this film with Keanu Reeves or The Rock and they would be nearly identical (The Rock would need to pop off boring quips while engaging in boring set pieces.) As I’ve written previously, the John Wick series (which is incredibly popular) is the apex of gun-porn cinema, and while Monkey Man (thankfully) relies far less on guns, it’s still nothing more than a man fighting nameless characters through a series of rooms to reach a final boss of some sort. Many films are based on video games, while others are simply written as aspirational versions of them—Monkey Man is one of those films.

Another technique that critics employ to package such boredom as interesting is by leveraging a cultural angle to what you’re viewing. Monkey Man is set in India, incorporates an Indian myth, and draws in way too many themes to dress up its rote violence as culturally interesting—we have the wealthy few versus the poor millions; natural landscapes and communities displaced by urban development; there’s a corrupt politician AND a corrupt religious figure; and to top it all off (and this is actually the film’s most interesting element), there is a displaced society of transgender people who essentially live underground and help Patel through the second act of the film when he is injured. Of course, they’re true validation arrives in the third act when they participate in the massive bloodshed for which we’ve all been waiting.

Can violence ever be interesting in cinema or television? Of course! I would offer the simple example of The Terminator, which asks meaningful questions about technological advancements and their use in war; these questions have only become more relevant over time with, for example, the recent news that artificial intelligence is being employed to determine when civilian deaths are appropriate in conflicts like the one unfolding in the Gaza region.

When is violence appropriate? We regularly ask this question about our own history and world, not just art. Indeed, there is something contextually different about violence in a film that locates itself in, say, slavery in America (think 12 Years a Slave) or the violence rooted in issues of sexual assault and violence against women (Thelma & Louise). The violence in Jordan Peele’s Us is startling and, I hesitate to use this word, “meaningful,” because Us is the first horror film ever made about supply-chain economics and the violence that hides behind any product’s final shelf destination and purchase.

Is this the case with Monkey Man? No. Not even close. It’s just another revenge story. You killed [this person who meant a lot to me] and now I will kill you in return. Behind all of the talk about culture, setting, Dev Patel embracing an Indian identity for this film (he’s British), and tenuous connections to mythology… it’s just another eye-for-an-eye story. It’s simply another plotless vehicle in service of the great repetitive boredom which is violence on screen—will Law & Order SVU be on for another 500 seasons? If Dev Patel wanted to show that he could be an action hero, it is not in the name of difference or diversity; it is entirely in the name of violent homogeneity.

Have these people not heard of Barbie or Oppenheimer? Have they missed the last year or so? Have they not seen Past Lives or The Holdovers? The four films just named were up for best picture. Give Aftersun or All of Us Strangers a try. The only best-picture nominated film that actively foregrounds human-on-human violence is Killers of the Flower Moon, which won… nothing, even while using its violence in the service of narrating important historical events many may not be familiar with.

I’ll issue my usual challenge. Wouldn’t it be interesting and refreshing if a major studio committed to at least a single year of putting out no films with guns or excessive violence? Just one year; that’s all I ask! Wouldn’t it be interesting to compare how these films and studio were performing against their competitors? Is it really that hard to imagine a police procedural that relied on every other device close at hand besides guns and violence—now that would be interesting.

Recurring violence in our real world is horrible enough; I would call it “boring” but the word doesn’t fit given the very real effects this has on people’s lives. If art is at times a vehicle for “escapism,” you’d think we’d see far less violence on screen, not more. But instead of elevated feats of imagination, we remain anchored to the seafloor boredom that is one guy/woman pulverizing ten other guys in a kitchen (look, he used a spoon!) before moving into the next room and doing it all again. And yes, the protagonists can be women, which we see more and more! Still, the result is equity in the genre that is boredom.

Dear Dev Patel, you are an incredible talent and captivating to watch. Don’t waste it. Even your few minutes in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar were far more interesting than the entirety of Monkey Man, which is just more of the same boring dish served cold.

I’ll take three thrilling minutes of Ryan Gosling singing “I’m Just Ken” over 125 minutes of this endless punching and kicking any day—it’s not only more fun, it’s more interesting.

Update: I just watched Greta Gerwig’s Little Women to cleanse myself. It was brilliant, moving, and meaningful. Nobody got shot on camera. Instead of killing the big boss, an inspired woman wrote a novel.