WHAT NOT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU'RE EXPECTING

Opening this weekend:

Monkey Man--The title character, also known variously as "Kid" and "Bobby," wears an ape mask in the ring in the underground fights from which he ekes out a living. He's a man on a mission; he wants to get close enough to the corrupt officials in the Indian city where he lives who caused the death of his mother and the destruction of his neighborhood when he was a child. In flashback, we see the saintly woman telling him stories of Hanuman, the heroic monkey-god from the Ramayana.

Our hero works his way up from floor-scrubber to waiter in the human-trafficking club where these creeps hang out, and from there, lots of blood-splattered mayhem ensues. Grievously wounded, he finds refuge in a religious community of transgendered people who become his allies against the bad guys.

This is the feature directorial debut of Dev Patel, who also wrote the story, co-wrote the script and stars. Patel, the kid from Slumdog Millionaire, has already shown his badass bona fides in 2018's overlooked, believable thriller The Wedding Guest, among other films, and he's a true action star here too, though he never loses a certain sympathetic callowness.

Other memorable cast members include the Jon Lovitz type Pitobash (known to American audiences from Million Dollar Arm) as the comic relief, gorgeous Ashwini Kalsekar as the sinister boss at the club, Vipin Sharma as the serene leader of the trans order, and Sharlto Copley as the shady fight manager. The standout, however, is Sikandar Kher as the brutal but shrewd police chief; his clashes with the Monkey Man are the high points of the film.

Shot in garish, lurid tones by Sharone Meir and slickly edited to propulsive Indian music, Monkey Man is extremely bloody, to be sure, at least by wide-release standards. I'm not sure that, at its bones, it's anything but a standard revenge tale, in the manner of a spaghetti western; Kid/Bobby/Monkey Man is a classic Man With No Name. But as such, it's helped by a gallery of seriously odious villains that help you invest in the hero's vengeance. Whether it's a healthy feeling or not, it's enormously satisfying every time the Monkey Man lands a punch.

The First Omen--Just a couple of years shy of its half-century mark, the original version of The Omen, enormously influential both on the horror genre and on society in general, is still spawning movies. In this prequel, set in Rome in 1971, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), a young American novice raised in Massachusetts, arrives at a Catholic orphanage and quickly realizes that something is very wrong behind the scenes.

Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, who was also among the screenwriters, this account of the diabolical Damien's nativity has its merits. It starts well, with a setting and a hapless heroine that suggest a tale from Sade. It has a brooding period atmosphere, some nightmarish imagery and sequences, and a cast stocked with veterans like Bill Nighy, Sonia Braga, Charles Dance and the bassoon-voiced Ralph Ineson as an Irish priest investigating the matter.

It's also potentially interesting on a thematic level, in that the plot to bring the Antichrist into the world, it turns out, is reactionary; deliberately concocted to create a concrete Evil which will drive people away from the rebellious, authority-questioning counterculture of the time and back to the Church. Something provocative could have been done with this idea.

So it's by no means an unintelligent piece of moviemaking. But it's a tiresomely unpleasant movie. The story concerns the effort to find a suitable mother for the little devil, which results in many extended scenes of restrained women groaning and whimpering and pleading and gasping, to a degree that felt to me uncomfortably close to torture porn at times.

It's possible that this movie's non-consensual gynecological and obstetric procedures are reflective of a post-Roe sensibility, and can thus claim political validity. But that doesn't make them any more watchable. Perhaps this First Omen should also be the last Omen. 

IT'S NOT THAT EASY BEATING GREEN

Opening this weekend:

The Green Knight--A huge green guy on a horse crashes King Arthur's Christmas Party, inviting any of Arthur's knights to strike him in return for his formidable green battle axe. The condition: one year hence, the assailant must show up at the Green Knight's place and allow him to return a blow of the same severity. Most of the Knights of the Round Table wisely take a pass; the ambitious young Gawain agrees and beheads the intruder, who promptly rises, picks up his own severed noggin, and tells Gawain see you next Christmas.

This, as you may recall from English class, is the set-up for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the anonymous 14th-Century Arthurian poem. It's been filmed at least twice before, including as the kitschy Sword of the Valiant in 1984, with Miles O'Keeffe and Sean Connery as Gawain and Greenie, respectively.

This new adaptation, by the American writer-director David Lowery, tries a more idiosyncratic approach. The story unfolds in an austere medieval look and atmosphere, with the characters skulking around really cold and inhospitable-looking castles, or desolate forests. The stylized imagery often recalls Old Masters religious art; Dev Patel, who plays Gawain, here looks like he stepped out of a Last Supper mural.

And yet the people are entirely and unromantically human. Patel plays Gawain as a typical young man with proximity to power but no real position: not a bad sort, but vain, petulant, reckless, horny and a little entitled (his Mom, played by Sarita Choudhury, is Arthur's sister Morgan Le Fay). Sean Harris plays Arthur with a thick, bumpkin-ish accent (he calls our hero "GAR-win"), and his Guinevere (Kate Dickie) looks like she's escaped from a cautionary TV spot about the dangers of smoking.

Lowery seems to want to show how honoring one's word under all-but-impossible circumstances--like, say, not only submitting to having your head cut off, but undergoing an arduous and dangerous journey to do it--happens in the real world of ordinary people with ordinary motivations, rather than in the idealized world of chivalric romance. It's a daring idea, but the result is a deeply eccentric, borderline campy movie unlikely to please either medieval classicists or fans of the Tolkien and Outlander flicks and Boorman's Excalibur. For one thing, there isn't one decent sword fight in the film; this Gawain is decidedly a lover, not a fighter.

But patient, open-minded viewers will know they've seen something at the end of this slow, exasperatingly fussy movie. Don't misunderstand; it's a challenge, but it's also visually beautiful; it's full of many odd, effective little episodes, like Gawain's encounter with St. Winifred (Erin Kellyman); and the actors generate a surprising degree of eroticism. Lowery's style recalls earlier movies ranging from Rohmer's 1978 Perceval le Gallois to the Peter Greenaway films to Scorcese's The Last Temptation of Christ, and even Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet. But it isn't quite an imitation of any of them.

The movie that The Green Knight most recalls, however, inevitably and unfortunately, is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As Gawain trudged through mist-shrouded woods, I kept waiting for The Knights Who Say "Ni" to show up. I would have been glad to see them, too.

SETTLING FOR SECOND BEST

Opening this week: 

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel—This sequel to the easygoing 2012 comedy about aging Brits retiring to a crumbling but comfortable hotel in Jaipur, India doesn’t stretch the material very far. It’s just more of the same, with most of the stars—Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup, Penelope Wilton and Diana Hardcastle—returning for more mild antics.

Dev Patel is back too, as the overenthusiastic young manager, along with the imposing Lillete Dubey as his stern but attractive mother and Tina Desae as his gorgeous fiancée. Richard Gere also turns up as a mystery man at the hotel, presumably a bone tossed to the American market.

So there are new romances and adventures and intrigues. In perhaps the cleverest of them, ladies' man Pickup comes to suspect that he may have inadvertently taken out a hit on his girlfriend—this strand could actually be a solid basis for a pretty good noir thriller.

But we’re never asked to take it seriously here. Nothing too upsetting happens, and the movie climaxes with a big Bollywood-style dance to that irresistible music.

It’s no big deal, but you read that cast, right? The movie almost can’t be a complete waste with any of them in it, let alone all.

Around midpoint, Dench and Smith exchange a few commonplace lines, with the subtext that both of them know a piece of difficult news that one isn’t discussing. All the mastery that these two have accumulated over their careers is there, in the steely compassion undergirding this short scene. It made Second Best Exotic worth sitting through all by itself