By Mark Fields
Brutal Revenge Thriller Disappoints
One can easily understand actor Dev Patel’s desire to break away from the earnest good guy roles he has played for much of his career in such movies as Slumdog Millionaire, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and Lion. We can even applaud him for taking control of his film choices by serving as screenwriter, producer, and director. But that also means the multi-hyphenate cannot escape the blame for when those choices go so gloriously off the rails as his new revenge thriller, Monkey Man.
A crude, brutal, and visually muddled film set entirely in Patel’s ancestral India, Monkey Man is little more than an Eastern version of John Wick, albeit without the existential panache of that series. The only question one has at the end of the movie is, “Dev, what were you thinking?”
Patel plays Kid, an anonymous young man who spends his nights wearing an ape mask and getting beaten to a pulp in an underground fight club. He uses this time to plot his revenge against powerful men that he holds responsible for the violent death of his mother years earlier. With a sadly predictable and threadbare plot, Kid works his way up to an implausible punch-fest finale, stopping briefly along the way to make underdeveloped critiques of India’s rampant Hindu nationalist politics and anti-LGBTQ discrimination. Those ideas would have made for a more complete social backdrop, but clearly they got in the way of the punching and stabbing and shooting.
As director, Patel shows some sense of composition and pacing, but the core story of this film is so devoid of depth that the occasional eye-catching shot hardly makes up for the balance of blurry, darkly lit, and rushed fight scenes. No doubt some viewers will be perfectly satisfied with the movie’s endless violence in an exotic locale, but the quality of Patel’s past work had this critic wanting more. Disappointing.
