Monkey Man review: An unfairly good directorial debut

Dev Patel did his homework. In front of an eager, humming South By Southwest crowd on Monday night, Patel nervously took the stage at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas, where he thoughtfully laid out the many, many influences that went into his directorial debut, Monkey Man. In an earnest monologue, he name-dropped everything from Enter The Dragon to The Raid to the action cinema of Korea and the Bollywood movies his family showed him as a boy. All of this and more, he explained, fueled his first film as a director, which he also co-wrote and stars in.

But it’s one thing to know your influences, and another entirely to put them into practice onscreen while losing none of your own singular voice. For all its many triumphs—and Monkey Man is a film packed with triumphs on a moment-by-moment level—Patel’s film may have found its greatest success in the way it seamlessly, powerfully translates the director’s pure, kinetic love of cinema into something bold, new, and unforgettable.

Patel stars as Kid, a bedraggled young man who lives in the slums of India. He ekes out a living fighting in a monkey mask in an underground boxing league run by an unsavory promoter (Sharlto Copley squeezing every ounce of joy out of his role) and carries the burden of his mother’s death and the destruction of his home when he was just a boy. Kid has scars, both mental and physical, that will never fade, at least not until he’s finally worked his way close enough to pull the trigger and get his vengeance on the men responsible for his pain.

When we meet him, Kid thinks he’s finally found a way in, washing dishes at an exclusive club where the police chief (Sikandar Kher) who birthed his misery happens to spend a lot of time in the VIP room. From there, he starts concocting a plan. But revenge is never simple and, in Kid’s case, it’s not something he can do alone.

Like I said, Patel did his homework. He knows every beat of the kinds of action films that drove Monkey Man into existence, and more importantly, he knows that his audience knows those beats just as well. That puts him in the interesting position of trying to get the rhythm right and deliver the goods while also making sure the rhythm is his own. It’s truly remarkable how well he pulls it off as a first-time director who’s also working hard in front of the camera. Within Monkey Man’s many action sequences, viewers will see everything from Taxi Driver to The Big Boss to The Raid to The Villainess, and so much more, all delivered with unbridled, frenzied energy by Patel and cinematographer Sharone Meir.

But Patel’s not just stringing together references, nor is he playing by all the rules that a lifetime of watching action movies might have taught him. For all the blood and all the brutality—and there is a lot of it, all expertly crafted—Monkey Man is at its most powerful when it quiets down. Kid is not just a fighter carrying decades of pain, but a man trying to find a way to still his restless mind and soothe his aching heart. There’s an element of Robin Hood in the way he rises up from the depths of society to challenge those placed on pedestals, but Patel does not simply pay lip service to that idea. Like other great socially conscious genre filmmakers Jordan Peele (who produced Monkey Man) and Bong Joon-ho, Patel gets deeper into the metaphors of the story he’s telling than an action story would seem to suggest, embedding Kid not just with the poor, but with the outcasts who dare to walk their own path in a society that keeps pushing them backward. It imbues the film with a sense of community and adds to the mythic tone in ways that Kid’s journey as a loner never could.

Speaking of Kid, Patel is absolutely phenomenal in front of the camera, whether he’s putting his own spin on a cinematic training montage or just training his intense gaze on someone from across a room. Ever since his breakthrough in Slumdog Millionaire, he’s been the kind of actor who can get you on his side with a glance, a smile, a single look that convinces an entire audience that he’s worth following, no matter how downtrodden or frightened or just plain beaten he might appear to be. Here, he takes that particular gift and sends it into overdrive, delivering a performance that’s at once constantly powerful and often shockingly vulnerable, an action hero with the soul of a poet.

In Patel’s hands as both star and director, Monkey Man becomes a new action classic just waiting for its audience, who will not be able to get enough of Kid and his relentless nature. It’s a muscular, emotional, ferocious triumph of a movie, and when it’s over, you’ll want to go right back in and watch it all over again.

Monkey Man releases in theaters on April 5.