Dev Patel’s directorial debut is an unexpectedly brutal and pulpy tale of revenge and redemption, told with visual verve and unflinching fight sequences.

Premise: An unnamed man (Dev Patel) eeks out a living being paid to lose fights as the monkey-masked fighter at an underground fight club in the Indian city of Yatana. But away from the ring, the man plots his revenge against the people responsible for a trauma he suffered during his childhood.

Review:

I’ve kept the description of Monkey Man’s premise fairly vague, as the specifics of the back story for Dev Patel’s character (who’s listed only as “Kid” in the credits) is slowly revealed during a series of impressionistic flashbacks over the course of the film – but you don’t need to know the specifics to understand that Monkey Man is a bloody, pulpy story of a nobody’s quest for vengeance against the powerful figures who have wronged him. What you may not be expecting is just how brutal this film gets in places, although I feel it’s also important to point out that the action is always portrayed in a heightened, hard-boiled noir style, and never gratuitously or exploitatively.

Monkey Man is undeniably Dev Patel’s film – not only does he star in it (and, I’m guessing, do a lot of his own stunts and fight scenes in the movie), but he also wrote the story, co-wrote the script and made this his directorial debut. I think it’s fair to say that while Dev Patel is an incredibly versatile actor who has done everything from mainstream, crowd-pleasing movies like Slumdog Millionaire to weird, niche indie films like The Green Knight, he’s never done something quite like this before.

“…Dev Patel delivers a tour-de-force with this directorial debut…”

As a writer, Dev Patel brings depth and a sense of place to the story – “Kid” has more layers than might be expected in a revenge movie of this nature, and he’s far from a mythical, indestructible one-man-army like John Wick. Although those films are clearly an inspiration (and they’re actually name-checked in the film at one point), I find the descriptions of Monkey Man as “John Wick in India” to be quite lazy and reductive. Dev Patel also captures the culture and specifics of the film’s Indian setting, rather than making it feel like it’s set in any generic overseas country, and the story touches unexpectedly on issues like social inequality, political corruption, nationalism, and discrimination, as well as the central revenge storyline.

As a director, Dev Patel delivers a tour-de-force with this debut, choosing a highly stylised and visually complex project for his first directing effort, rather than a movie in which people stand around having conversations in rooms. But he didn’t chew off more than he could manage – Dev Patel brings a visual flair to even the more basic moments (like following the journey of a pickpocketed purse through the city), but when it comes to the action, you’d never guess that he hadn’t directed complex, long-take, fight sequences before. I suspect that The Raid was another inspiration for Dev Patel when making Monkey Man, and there are sequences in this movie that are worthy of being talked about in the same conversation. While his use of ‘shaky cam’ as a technique can be quite disorientating in places, it was only later that I realised the sense of disorientation was entirely deliberate (to put the audience in the same state of confusion as the character at that time), and in other scenes where the character is far more in control of the situation, the camera work reflects this with a more controlled frame. This is an impressive use of techniques from a first-time director.

“…Dev Patel delivers an unflinchingly visceral performance…”

As an actor, Dev Patel delivers a performance that won’t be forgotten in a hurry. He’s always been an incredibly charismatic actor with a screen presence that draws audiences in, which means that during the slow-burn periods of the movie the audiences’ attention never falters – but then when it comes time for the action, Dev Patel delivers an unflinchingly visceral performance in which he entirely convinces as someone who is capable of the feats that “Kid” performs.

There’s probably only one other actor in the movie that most international viewers will recognise (Sharlto Copley, who has a small role as the promoter of the underground fight club), but the cast of Indian actors all excel in bringing their supporting characters to life. In comparison to most of Hollywood’s output, Monkey Man is a very low-budget film (its budget is reported to be $10m, which is a small fraction of even a modest action film like the first Extraction, which reportedly had a budget of $65m) – but the end result feels very high-quality. We can apparently thank Jordan Peele for ensuring that the film received the promotion and theatrical release that it deserved, because he came on as a producer after the film was shot, when Netflix got cold feet after seeing how uncompromising the film was.

“…maintains a sense of fun & dark humour even during the most bone-crunching of set-pieces…”

But as unflinching as the action sequences are, and as pointed as some of the social commentary is, Dev Patel never loses sight of the fact that Monkey Man is entertainment, and he maintains a sense of fun (and dark humour) even during the most bone-crunching of set-pieces (one cutaway shot to an onlooker during the final act had me laughing out loud).

There are some flaws (as well as the use of shaky cam which may be excessive for some, there are also arguably one or two too many flashbacks, and more time could have been spent fleshing out a couple of the supporting characters who never feel like they quite live up to their build-up), but that’s perhaps to be expected from a first-time writer/director, and the positives far outweigh the negatives. Bold, original and creative, Monkey Man establishes Dev Patel as the British action hero that we never knew we had.