Monkey Man Is a Solid Action Thriller, But It Clearly Wants to Be More

Dev Patel in Monkey Man. Photo: Universal Pictures

This review was originally published on April 5, 2024. Monkey Man is now available to stream on Peacock.

One day, Dev Patel will surely direct a great movie. He clearly has the talent, as evidenced by Monkey Man, a feverish action-revenge thriller that’s more notable for its bravura editing and impressively grimy, up-close-and-frightful fight scenes than for its story or its stabs at political resonance or any layered portrayal of its protagonist. None of these other things would matter, of course, if they didn’t matter to the movie itself. As an action flick, Monkey Man is often quite entertaining, but it keeps distracting you with images of the film it’s trying, and often failing, to be.

Monkey Man will prompt comparisons to John Wick, egged on by the picture itself, which directly and indirectly references Chad Stahelski and David Leitch’s now-classic Keanu Reeves revenge shoot-’em-up. (It also nods to any number of Indian, Indonesian, and Hong Kong action films, as well as a variety of hazily remembered straight-to-video movies.) But the protagonist this time isn’t a legendarily cold-blooded assassin. Known only as Kid (Patel), he’s a bare-knuckles boxer in an ape mask whose specialty, it seems, is getting the crap kicked out of him by bigger, stronger, better fighters — a hapless, impulsive nobody. But he’s also biding his time in the underworld of Yatana (a fictional stand-in for Mumbai), seeking to get closer to the higher echelons of power.

Soon, he’s ingratiated himself into the employ of Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar), a restaurateur/pimp/dealer who provides any number of not-so-clandestine services to the wealthy, and we begin to sense the Kid’s true target. He’s got a simmering vendetta against the city’s chief of police (Sikandar Kher), who is closely allied to a Hindu nationalist organization, the Sovereign Party, led by a self-fashioned guru named Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande) who pretends to have a life of modesty but is clearly just another pious hypocrite. (The Sovereign Party of the film has a strong real-world resemblance to India’s ruling BJP, which will likely lead to some censorship and release problems for the movie in India, particularly as the country enters an election period.)

The Kid’s beloved mother (Adithi Kalkunte) was, we learn, killed during the removal of a group of villagers from their forest home by authorities. The film delivers this backstory in dreamy dribs and drabs, but we get the idea fairly early on; what’s left are just the heartbreaking and grisly details. We do also get sweeter flashbacks, to our young hero being taught about the ways of the forest by his mother, learning about the bravery of the monkey-god Hanuman and dreaming of being just like him.

Elsewhere, my colleague Siddhant Adlakha has detailed the troubling reverberations of the film’s appropriation of loaded religious imagery in its tale of righteous violence. While this certainly wouldn’t be the first time an action movie has targeted the powerful while indulging in the very mythologies those in power like to exploit (just ask anybody who lived through the 1980s), what stands out in Monkey Man is the extent to which Patel repeatedly cuts to this stuff, including dream visions, historical paintings, multiple scenes of his protagonist praying, and one scene that seems to suggest that our hero is in fact becoming Hanuman, or at least getting his power from the monkey god.

Patel seems eager to elevate his genre potboiler into the realm of deeper meaning and spiritual gravitas. Which is a shame, because he’s got an otherwise perfectly good genre potboiler on his hands. Monkey Man’s close-quarter fight sequences — filled with eye-gouging and nut-punching and head-smashing and what must be a world record for throat-stabbings — have a welcome immediacy, thanks partly to the fact that the hero isn’t, at least at first, particularly good at fighting. Combined with the rhythmic editing, the eclectically poppy score, and the saturated color palette, it all makes for a pleasantly frantic experience.

What is missing from the movie is — and I can’t quite believe I’m writing this — Dev Patel, the actor. A supremely talented leading man, he’s one of those performers who mixes great range with great presence. All this was on full display in 2019’s The Wedding Guest, a now somewhat-forgotten Michael Winterbottom action-romance that proved Patel could be a genre lead, mixing his usual charm and depth with an alluring physicality. He’s got even more physicality in Monkey Man, and it’s clear he’s spent a ton of time trying to get these action scenes right, both as performer and director. But we so rarely glimpse Patel’s face at rest in this hectic, stylized film. The flashback structure, with its constant temporal leapfrogging and nightmare visions and bursts of music, does most of the emoting for the character, so the movie is not cold, exactly. But in the search for visceral thrills, something seems to have faded into the background: a sense of depth, or inner life. And no, the overload of spiritual imagery doesn’t quite cover for it.

Action movies do this all the time, to be fair. Keanu Reeves’s John Wick was stoic to a fault; Liam Neeson’s characters calmly suffer; Arnold Schwarzenegger was a stone-faced killer. At their best, their films build symphonies of mayhem out of those single notes. But Monkey Man clearly aspires to something more, something transcendent and meaningful. And when you’ve got such a great talent in the lead, it seems like a waste not to use him. Somebody should remind Dev Patel the director that Dev Patel the actor can do a lot more than this.