Monkey Man: Dev Patel wreaks brutal havoc in a muddled but enthralling revenge drama
Its multiple story threads and attempts to satirise India’s government sit awkwardly with the action, but there’s much to admire in Dev Patel‘s frenzied, ultraviolet genre spectacle.
At a key juncture in Monkey Man, Dev Patel’s nameless, vengeful action hero seeks a quick escape after causing a bloody ruckus in a high-rise, high-end members’ club. Spotting a large window in a stairwell, he launches himself at the glass, as we brace for a glittering, gravity-defying feat of human flight. We are disappointed, and so is he: the glass remains unshattered, and our man crumples to the ground, before limping down the stairs.
This persistence of human weakness amid ultraviolent genre spectacle is a winning feature of Monkey Man, conceived and directed by Patel himself as a vehicle for his own offbeat screen presence. The wiry star of Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and Lion (2016) isn’t the first actor you’d think of for John Wick-style kick-ass gymnastics. But rather like his character, an impoverished street scrapper in the fictional city of Yatana (a thinly disguised Mumbai) plotting to wreak havoc on India’s political elite, Patel makes a virtue of being underestimated.
Shot and choreographed with a kineticism that never veers too far into the sleekly balletic, the fight scenes here are often enthralling and genuinely bruising. They retain a necessary sense of life-or-death consequence and of the frenzied amateur using every survival tool at his disposal. When Patel’s character stabs an opponent, he drives the blade in not with his hands but with his teeth. You wince, but at the same time, you want to applaud.
The script, co-written by Patel with Paul Angunawela and John Collee, doesn’t have quite the same intense drive. A hackneyed backstory is filled in via gauzy flashbacks to the protagonist’s rural childhood, gradually and rather predictably detailing his mother’s murder at the hands of Rana (Sikandar Kher), now a high-powered police chief under guru-like political leader Shakti (Makarand Deshpande). Monkey Man’s attempts to satirise India’s right-wing Hindutva government sit awkwardly between the visceral mechanics of its revenge drama and its more ambient spiritual overtones: the legend of Hindu deity Hanuman is invoked, more directly in iconography than story, and a mid-film passage details our battered hero’s mentorship by transgender mystic Alpha (Vipin Sharma). These are potentially rich diversions, but the film is too jittery to develop them in full.
Monkey Man is at its best when brutely single-minded, with Patel the director wearing his tough-guy influences – from Nicolas Winding Refn to Anurag Kashyap – nakedly and stylishly on his sleeve. Patel the actor, meanwhile, gets any tough-guy posing beaten out of him, revealing a hungrier, more desperately compelling fighter beneath.
► Monkey Man is in UK cinemas from 5 April.