Dev Patel Claws, Bites, and Punches His Way to Action Hero in ‘Monkey Man’

By Seth Freilich | Film | April 5, 2024 |

By Seth Freilich | Film | April 5, 2024 |

In 2007, the British channel E4 began airing a show about high school kids called Skins. Over the years, a number of the actors from that show have broken out — Nicholas Hoult, Joe Dempsie, Kaya Scodelario, Daniel Kaluuya, and Jack O’Connell, among others. The first two seasons of that show also starred Dev Patel playing the comic relief role of Anwar, a little hip-hop kid looking to get laid. Stateside, people now best know Patel from Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Hotel Mumbai, and/or the criminally underappreciated The Green Knight. That will likely change with Monkey Man, Patel’s writing and directing debut. Now, people on both sides of the pond and everywhere else will know Patel as one of our newest action stars.

Like many great action films before it, Monkey Man has a relatively simple revenge premise as the motivating plot thread. Patel’s unnamed character, credited as “Kid” and referring to himself at times as “Bobby,” suffered a traumatic childhood event that left him with severely scarred hands and a desire to get back at those that caused this. The problem with getting that revenge, however, is that this will bring him face-to-face with the very corrupt chief of police Rana (Sikandar Kher), as well as the even more corrupt Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), a guru pulling some major political strings. The Kid ditches underground boxing to work his way into a job at the secretive establishment run by Quennie (Ashwini Kalsekar), his best chance at getting at Rana and/or Baba Shakti. The rest of the plot is straightforward — he makes some friends (co-worker Alphonso, played by Pitobash) and allies (the guru Alpha, played by Vipin Sharma), faces some setbacks, and causes much violence and mayhem.

While the plot is straightforward, Patel has added a few layers to enrich the film, noting that he wanted to give it soul and trauma and “try to find a different calibration” to the action film formula. He does this in a few ways. First, the progress of the action stands as a metaphor for India’s caste system, something the film highlights in non-action scenes that show the glaring disparity between the fictional city Yatana’s slums and a bustling modern cityscape. Second, he artfully doles out the Kid’s backstory (at least, the pieces relevant to this revenge tale) through almost dream-like sequences (often after the Kid has taken a beating). Later, these are all cut together in a more standard flashback, which adds emotional weight to the story but feels a little like someone was afraid of leaning in on the other approach.

The third layer of the film is a heavy helping of Indian and Hindu religious and mythological storytelling, characters, and metaphors. Throughout the movie, we are told the tale of Hanuman, a Hindu deity central to the Ramayana saga. Hanuman is the monkey commander of the monkey army, and the Kid wears a monkey mask in Hanuman’s honor when he’s in the boxing ring. The husband and wife pairing of Shiva and Parvati play a symbolic role as the Kid spends some time with Alpha, providing additional spiritual motivation for the film’s final act. And that act takes place during the start of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. All of this enriches the film, grounding it and giving it some of that soul Patel wanted to inject.

But you want to know about the action, right? And the action is a violent delight. At first glance, Patel might look like an odd choice to play a role that relies so much on physicality. But the same could have been said about Keanu before someone dared to come after his puppy. Patel first fell in love with action films when he saw Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon (here was someone who “looked slightly like me … and had the same pigment as me”) and Lee, similarly, did not necessarily cut an imposing physical figure (though he was of course cut). Bruce Lee is merely the first of many many action influences that Patel brings to bear in Monkey Man. While there are too many to name, that list includes (either because Patel named them or because you can easily see it on screen) Lee, Donnie Yen, Park Chan-wook,* The Raid, the John Wick films, the Jason Bourne films, and a healthy heaping of Bollywood.

*Talking about his path of discovery when it comes to action, Patel’s best quote was, “Then I found out about Korean cinema and … fuck me.”

Now, a sloppy action film tries to copy some of the highlights from what came before it. While countless callbacks exist to these works in Monkey Man, none feels like naked mimicry. Instead, it feels like Patel and his team took bits and bobs and creatively weaved them together in ways that feel both new while recognizing the deep historical roster of action that came before. It’s like a blanket made out of knives and guns and broken body parts and gushing blood from other films. It is worth noting that the film is not non-stop action. It’s about 40 minutes before the first real action set piece, besides the underground boxing, kicks in. There’s an ebb and flow to the film, a rhythm that elevates the action when it comes.

Speaking of rhythm, I want to call out my favorite scene from the film, something others mentioned and which Patel spoke of after the screening. As he put it, he wanted to have a Rocky sequence but with a more rhythmic call and answer. So his team found a drummer who played with Ravi Shankar and put together an excellent punch training scene that is the perfect example of what I was talking about before: equal parts homage and original.

That is a credit to Patel but just as much to the rest of his team. Sharone Meir’s (Whiplash) cinematography is gorgeous, and the editing team balances a frenetic, propulsive tone that lets the viewer follow the action. An interesting thing they did was train one of their stunt performers to become a camera operator, something I had not heard of before, which let them get some dynamic and new action shots. Patel also gave his body to this film, breaking both a foot and a hand, tearing something in his shoulder, and getting an eye infection from … well, from a scene where he spent too much time crawling around a bathroom floor.

All that relative glowing aside, Monkey Man is not a perfect film. It went through a long production starting in 2019, and while Dev credits Jordan Peele’s Monkey Paw for coming in to help “get it over the finish line,” you can squint a little and see some cracks where the film probably got a bit overworked over the years. Similarly, one imagines that the long production led to some production constraints, which may be why there are some moments where some effects and CGI are a bit rougher than one would like. But even still, the action and the cast always pull you back. Given that this is Patel’s first time behind the camera, it is all impressively confident, even in the moment where you can see the seams.

The last thing of note is the cast. Patel carries the action well, but he also carries the rest in a role that has him somewhat reserved vocally; his face is covered in all the emotions he’s feeling (and, yeah, a lot of blood and grime), keeping the viewer on the journey with him. Kher is the perfectly looming villain, and Sharlto Copley is deliciously smarmy as the guy running the underground boxing ring. But the real standout is Pitobash, who bounces from antagonist to comic relief to sidekick and oozes charisma on the screen. I hope this breaks him through in the US (if he wants it) because I’d love to see him on our screens here more (not to discount his 40-odd credits going back well over a decade). And that sums Monkey Man up well. A great time that left me wanting so much more.

Monkey Man had its world premiere at SXSW 2024 - where it received a rare standing ovation before what Peele rightfully called a “huge, raucous fucking audience” - and hits theaters (in the US at least) on April 5, 2024.