A Brilliantly Brutal Dev Patel

As an actor, Dev Patel has tended to play bighearted softies in rousing crowd-pleasers. Though he’s occasionally ventured beyond such territory—see his brooding, magnetic work in 2021’s The Green Knight—Patel’s résumé highlights include an embattled game-show contestant in Slumdog Millionaire, a kind manager in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, and a haunted adoptee in Lion.

His character in Monkey Man, simply known as “Kid,” bucks that trend while also feeling like a sharp declaration of intent from Patel himself. Having lost his family and his home to the corrupt leaders of a fictional Indian city, Kid seeks to destroy the people who ruined his life, one fistfight at a time. But Monkey Man is no mere formulaic revenge film. Directed by Patel from a screenplay he co-wrote, the movie combines its brutal violence with the kind of somber story about finding purpose amid an oppressive society that recalls much of his previous work. The result is a stylish thriller that’s also a cathartic unleashing of Patel as a performer and storyteller. With Monkey Man, he asserts himself as someone who can break the boundaries Hollywood typically establishes for actors like him.

As an action movie, Monkey Man is impressive, and the intense fights between Kid and his adversaries are complex. One showdown involves a man swinging a hatchet over and over at Kid’s head, missing him by millimeters each time. Another finds Kid trapped in an elevator with an enemy, holding a knife between his teeth to strike back while his hands are pinned down. And Patel, notably, did not bulk up to hulking superhero levels for the role; the actor cuts a lean figure, underlining Kid’s vulnerability and naivete. At the end of a chase sequence, when Kid attempts to escape by leaping through a window, his body bounces off the glass, too light to make a dent.

It helps, too, that Patel has an eye for provocative compositions. Drawing on the work of Korean auteurs, Hong Kong action movies, and the Indonesian film franchise The Raid, he deploys dizzying camerawork that makes set pieces propulsive. Whether Kid’s in a grimy underground fight club or a luxury building owned by the criminal empire he’s targeting, the locations feel both familiar and otherworldly, festooned with symbolism from Indian culture and mythology. The viewing experience is raw and almost tactile: You can practically smell the sweat, taste the dust, and maybe even feel the fury behind Kid’s blows.

However, Monkey Man struggles at times to balance its kinetic violence with its weighty story. Flashbacks to Kid’s origins as a desperate child who witnessed his mother’s death and his village’s destruction get replayed one too many times, slowing the plot’s momentum. Like other revenge movies, Kid faces mini-bosses on his way to fighting the final villain, but these antagonists are thinly written avatars for greed and cruelty. Patel weaves in themes of faith, poverty, and inequality, as well as pointed commentary on India’s politics—he splices in real-life news reports, and Kid finds sanctuary with a community of persecuted trans women called the hijra. But the film can feel thematically overstuffed, these social issues never quite cohering with Kid’s personal odyssey of punishment.

Still, I can’t fault Patel for perhaps feeling the need to throw so many of his interests into Monkey Man. For years, he has expressed frustration with Hollywood’s clichéd portrayals of Indian characters, as well as with people’s constant questioning of why, as a British Asian actor, he frequently plays characters native to India. Creating the character of Kid for himself to embody seems like a rebuke to those concerns and relief from the stress they bring. Patel is playing an Indian character with an Indian accent contending with Indian society—underscoring how rare it is to see an action vehicle for this kind of protagonist. Kid feels like the culmination of Patel’s many past roles, as well as an opportunity to finally channel some of his persistent irritation about the industry onto the screen.

[Read: Lion is inspirational storytelling done right]

As a result, this seems like a film that only Patel could have made. In fact, Monkey Man was constantly on the brink of failure throughout its production. Filming almost didn’t move forward because of the pandemic, and funding came close to being pulled; Patel has called the nine-month shoot “absolute joy and utter chaos” amid his injuries and bad luck with broken equipment. Monkey Man was eventually bought by Netflix and destined for a streaming-only run until the writer-director Jordan Peele brought the movie under his production company to ensure a theatrical release.

It’s not hard to see why Peele became so invested, given Patel’s arresting central performance. Patel sells the pain behind every hit Kid takes and delivers, while underscoring an aching point: The more he brawls, the more his anger transforms him into a feral, almost inhuman being. The film may be about the terrible allure of revenge, the limitations of faith, and the way violence can seep into the Hindu caste system. But Monkey Man is also, more than anything, proof of Patel’s commitment to moving beyond being the gentle, irreproachable good guy. It’s a filmmaker’s mission statement, soaked in his own blood and sweat.