Hanuman is a Cambodian action film directed and written by two Western filmmakers. The film tells a revenge story revolving around two brothers. They witness their father's murder by a group of local gangsters when they were young. Twelve years later, the younger brother, Vicheat, becomes a traditional Cambodian martial art Bokator master. He wears a monkey mask and becomes a vigilante, trying to avenge his father's death on his own. His brother, Srong, becomes a police officer with a wife and a daughter. While on the surface he has moved on, he is still collecting evidence, trying to put the mob boss in jail through a legal process.
The plot, as many have pointed out, is fairly generic. The director and writer claim that they are paying homage to Sergio Leone, and we can also see some tropes from other Asian martial arts film. For instance, after their father was murdered, Vicheat was saved by an unassuming old man, who happened to be a Kung Fu master.
It's been a while since the last time I watched “A Fistful of Dollars”, but I don't recall that Leone had ever created a cinematic world as grotesque as “Hanuman”'s director Jimmy Henderson did here. Every bad guy in this film has a strange trait and they are all evil. The streets in the movie are often dirty and disgusting. Even the traditional market is portrayed as a site of violence. (While I'm not Cambodian, the sight of traditional market is familiar to me. While butchers do cut and slice the meat in front of you, it's more like a center of the community than a violent place.)
In a way, these settings and stories are not important at all. They are merely the pretext to showcase the elaborate fight choreographies. They are fascinating to see for sure, and Henderson doesn't hold back at all. The fight scenes are fairly gruesome. But since the characters here are essentially generic set-ups, I'm not sure I was fully engaged with the film while I was watching this picture. These ultra-violent scenes are somehow cartoonish.
If you are an action film aficionado, “Hanuman” provides a unique chance for outsiders to see Bokator in action. If not, it's a decent action flick which aims to satisfy your basic entertainment needs. And it delivers.
