Dev Patel’s Monkey Man is an unwieldy, feverish revenge action movie. It’s now playing in theaters.
Monkey Man isn’t a kick or punch to the face. It’s an existential wail. Actor Dev Patel’s feature directorial debut, which was famously saved from its original Netflix release by Jordan Peele and Universal Pictures, doesn’t seem capable of holding back. It’s full of more disorienting stylistic flourishes than it knows what to do with and plenty of sweaty, bone-breaking action sequences, but pulsing beneath every one of its frames is an intense rage that is, at times, astonishing. Patel’s passion is never in doubt, and he believes so fervently in the film’s ideas about corruption and justice that he treats his protagonist’s familiar quest for revenge with a divine kind of reverence.
There are so many emotions, references, and inspirations spilling out of Monkey Man that one gets the sense watching it that Patel has been waiting his entire life to make it. The movie feels like the culmination of many of Patel’s artistic interests up to this point, and it’s clear that he put it together without assuming he’ll ever get the chance to director another film like it. As admirable as that is, it’s also led Patel to stuff more into Monkey Man than it’s capable of containing. He’s delivered a vigilante thriller that doesn’t feel like a targeted strike so much as it does a violent thrashing, and the finished film is just as spirited and messy as that suggests.
At the center of Monkey Man is Kid (Patel), an unnamed young man who spends his days and nights in India boxing in underground matches and putting together a plan to find and kill Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher), the corrupt police chief responsible for his mother’s death years prior. In brief flashbacks, viewers are given glimpses of not only the gruesome tragedy that drives Patel’s anonymous vigilante forward but also the happy childhood memories he shared with his mother, which haunt him just as much as her death. These moments, in all their handheld, Malick-esque intimacy, are visually striking but do little more than obscure the full truth of Monkey Man‘s inciting incident, which the film waits to reveal in a protracted sequence that just contributes further to its second act’s pacing issues.
