'Monkey Man': Welcome to the Action-Movie Pantheon, Dev Patel

Revenge, we’re constantly told, is a dish best served cold — unless you’re a modern genre-flick fanatic, in which case you need payback to be served piping hot and preferably moving at 120 mph. Monkey Man is, on the surface, a fairly simple tale of vengeance: Man has vendetta. Man infiltrates villain’s world with intent on procuring a pound (or two, or 50) of flesh. See Man punch. And kick. And stab, slice, gouge, grapple, and disembowel. It also a labor of love for its writer-director-producer-star Dev Patel, and one that remains self-aware enough to realize that it’s entering an environment in which some explosions, a shootout and a few haymakers here and there will no longer cut it. Everything must be a melee. Nothing less than nonstop beast mode will suffice.

Luckily, Patel doesn’t have a problem with this way of thinking. In fact, his goal with his directorial debut is not to beat action moviemakers and A-list asskickers at their own game but to work his way into their ranks. A gleefully anarchic addition to the post-Raid: Redemption, post-John Wick world of mix-and-match fighting styles and adrenalized weapon-play, Patel’s pet project is as much a mash note to a way of presenting bloody-knuckled spectacle as it is a standard thriller. During his long introduction to the film’s premiere at SXSW last night, the hyphenate talked about his childhood love of Bruce Lee and namechecked both Indonesian and Korean action cinema in addition to a certain Keanu Reeves franchise. And while this entry into international mayhemsploitation territory often feels very much like a rough, earnest fan film dialing those influences up to 11, it also suggests that if Patel’s technique behind the camera catches up to his passion for the genre, he’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

His character, known only as “Kid,” is a regular figure in the underground fight-club circuit in Mumbai; he’s essentially a human punching bag, paid by the promoter (Sharlto Copley) to take a beating from whomever he’s up against. He’s known for a wearing a monkey mask in the ring, which doubles as a tribute to Hanuman, the Hindu deity who once led an army of simians against the ancient forced of evil. The mythological character was like a superhero to him when he was a boy, living in a remote village in the countryside. His mother would regale him with stories about Hanuman’s great deeds. That was, until the police came and slaughtered his friends, neighbors and the woman who loved him more than anything else in the universe.

Now, the Kid’s a grown man, living in the big city. He’s scammed his way into a job with Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar), who runs a club catering to rich sex tourists and Mumbai’s toxic elite. After befriending Alphonso, the in-house gofer-slash-comic-relief (the mono-monikered Pitobash), Kid gets a promotion and is now serving champagne in the V.I.P. room. This is where Rama Singh (Sikander Kher) hangs out. Rama is the chief of police. He’s also the one responsible for the massacre that happened in our hero’s home town and left him permanently traumatized. Now the chance to settle a major score is within Kid’s reach. He just has to find the right moment to strike….

That turns out to be in a men’s restroom after Kid has sabotaged Singh’s dose of party drugs, at which point we get the first real taste of Patel as both an auteur dedicated to staging close-quarters combat and a purveyor of fists-of-fury chaos. You can tell that he, cinematographer and lover of color-filtered lighting Sharone Meir, French fight choreographer Brahim Chab, as well as his stunt coordinator Udeh Nans (and likely Patel’s stunt double) have mapped out a long sequence that starts with the simple pulling of a gun — and soon involves a bullet-riden fish tank, broken porcelain, busted jaws, a tuk-tuk chase scene and more Dutch angles and shaki-cam shots than you thought were legal. The style of shooting fight sequences that make viewers feel as if they themselves are in the middle of the fray has become cliché to the max. Yet Patel & co. throw themselves into this string of set pieces with the exuberance of enthusiastic amateurs rather than seasoned (read: jaded) pros. The familiarity somehow does not dim the rush, probably because of the infectiousness happening behind the lens and the sheer go-for-broke physicality happening in front of it. Besides, Patel is just getting warmed up.

Monkey Man isn’t above hitting the well-worn action film beats — again, this is a fan’s valentine to decades of Thrills Spills Chills Inc., from someone who knows these narratives backwards, forwards and sideways. And after Kid escapes his captors and is nursed back to health by a transgender community who have also dealt with persecution and violence first-hand, it’s simply a matter of screen time and training montages before the masked incarnation of Hanuman returns for one final boss battle. There are swipes at the way society’s underdogs and outcasts are treated by those who rule, how religious and cultural differences get politicized and then weaponized in the name of power and profit, and how a caste system continues to warp the humanity of all involved. Patel has said that he wanted to bring “soul” to a genre he loves so dearly, as well as a cultural specificity that goes beyond easy exoticization. You can tell he’s trying to thread in his own sense of identity as a performer and a person — to give you a sense not just that you’re watching an action movie shot mostly in India, but by someone in touch with their history and heritage includes being of Indian descent.

That said, Monkey Man is Patel’s way of leaving his mark on 21st century cinéma du kapow by courting the same feeling he gets as a consumer of screen carnage via creating it himself. This is not a message movie. It is a mayhem movie. One with personality and verve and food for thought served as a side dish, but a mayhem movie nonetheless. So when Patel throws that first lightning-fast right hook and aims an elbow at the face of thugs guarding the door, thus effectively kicking off a last act that can hold its own against almost any big climactic martial-arts-meets-gun-fu-meets-stabby-stab sequence of the past 10 years or so — this is the stuff his dreams are made off. Even when his debut stumbles occasionally as a storytelling vehicle, it still brims with the blood, sweat, tears, joy and more blood of person determined to make it a reality. The gentleman has clearly done his homework and put in hard training. An eventual entry into the Pantheon of hyperkinetic pulp creators doesn’t feel like a reach at all.

(Full disclosure: In 2021, Rolling Stone’s parent company, P-MRC, acquired a 50 percent stake in the SXSW festival.)