Monkey Man review: Dev Patel's ruthless killer makes John Wick look like John ... trends now
Dev Patel is the writer, director, co-producer and star of Monkey Man, a revenge thriller set in a fictional Indian city seething with sectarian hatred.
Patel's multi-faceted involvement explains a lot, because it's hard to imagine anyone else casting the sweet-faced hero of Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and The Personal History Of David Copperfield (2019) as a vengeance-fuelled murderer so unrepentantly violent he makes John Wick look like John Inman.
Well, he doesn't quite. But I'm sure you take the point. Patel's unnamed killer, listed in the credits only as Kid, is certainly a ruthless liquidation machine comparable with Wick, the Keanu Reeves character who never met a heavy he didn't shoot, stab, throttle or shove down a lift shaft.
As for dear old Inman, his catchphrase as the camp menswear assistant Mr Humphries, which he trilled in every episode of the 1970s sitcom Are You Being Served?, was 'I'm free!'
Dev Patel in a scene from the Universal Pictures new film: Monkey Man
Dev Patel is the writer, director, co-producer and star of Monkey Man
Kid, by contrast, is not free. He is enslaved by the compulsion to avenge his beloved mother, whose death, at the hands of a corrupt cop, he watched as a child. And he is also enslaved by Indian society itself, ruled by the privileged at the expense of the oppressed.
Patel deserves some credit for trying to give his retribution story a spot of cultural context. On the other hand, the way Monkey Man all but fetishises extreme violence raises the suspicion that the other stuff is just an excuse for him to unleash his inner Bruce Lee.
Patel has often talked about his boyhood admiration for the martial arts star, so maybe at some level it was frustrating for him to bumble around as the engagingly hapless Sonny Kapoor in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, when all he really wanted to do was kick the living daylights out of people in his own version of Enter The Dragon.
Patel's unnamed killer, listed in the credits only as Kid, is certainly a ruthless liquidation machine, writes Brian Viner
Monkey Man is a revenge thriller set in a fictional Indian city seething with sectarian hatred
Monkey Man, his debut as a director, takes its title from an old Hindu legend which beguiled Kid as a child and has also inspired his persona on the city's underground fighting circuit, which is run by a sleazy South
