Monkey Man is the latest in a string of John Wick-adjacent movies. Blame Liam Neeson for starting it, with those Taken movies. Or the Incredible Hulk, and his “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” warning. Or even, just maybe, the vengeful God of the Old Testament. You don’t want to get any of these guys riled.
It’s Dev Patel this time around, returning to the India of his breakthrough movie role. Slumdog Millionaire made Patel movie-famous after TV show Skins had made him TV-famous (in the days when there was still a big difference). Here he is playing a guy from the streets wangling a job in a high-end brothel so he can exact maximum payback from a bad guy who wronged his family.
Working in the kitchen by day, KId (as he’s called) ingratiates himself with his superiors and gains access to the inner sanctum where the hottest girls and best drugs are served up for the enjoyment of a corrupt elite. Kid has a strange sideline. At night he dons a monkey mask and takes to the boxing ring, where he is regularly beaten to a pulp for the entertainment of a baying crowd.
Patel stars, co-wrote, produced and directed the movie and makes no bones about what he’s up to. John Wick is explicitly namechecked early on, though for a good while it does look like Kid is the anti-Wick – he’s not very good at fighting and doesn’t put the fear of anything into anyone. Then it’s as if Patel wakes up and realises that this will not do. Cue training montage, various shots of Patel looking lean and fit with his top off and a second half where things conform to the standard.
Or they would if Patel wasn’t also trying to introduce social and political themes by engaging with class, race, caste and religion. Laudable though this might be, it gets in the way of the fighting, when it eventually kicks off. This is most obvious in the section where a wounded and near-dead Kid is rescued by a community of hijra, the “third gender” outcasts of Indian society, and the film essentially goes on holiday for a while, until Patel once again wakes up.
Patel borrows Danny Boyle’s rich colourful looks and nervous Slumdog camera moves for his movie, which takes a series of familiar situations and gives them a tweak, in the hope that it’ll be enough to make Monkey Man stand out from the crowd. It stood out enough for Jordan Peele, of Get Out, Us and Nope, to get on board as a producer and rescue Patel’s movie from the hands of Netflix, who were nervous about political content obviously aimed at the ruling, minority-baiting BJP party of Narendra Modi and wanted to kick Patel’s film into oblivion.
There is salty support from the excellent Pitobash as a skanky fixer for Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar), the too-familiar brothel madam, some nicely grungey moments from Sharlto Copley, underused as the announcer/promoter of the boxing fights Kid invariably loses and Sobhita Dhulipala as the tart with a heart introduced as a potential love interest and then more or less entirely forgotten.
But never mind all that, is the fighting any good? No, sadly. Along with the “cultural” (Patel’s word) stuff, it’s the way Patel has chosen to shoot the fights that lets the film down. It’s not terrible, but it’s too close-quarters to allow us to see how good the fighters are. Or, more to the point, how well the fights have been choreographed. And the emphasis on subjective point-of-view shots really gets tiring.
This is not a bad film. It’s a good film that’s gone a bit wrong. Patel is a charismatic, athletic star and some of the action will get a whoop and a cheer from most fans of this sort of thing. But it is a “this sort of thing” film, and no amount of monkeying around can alter that.
Monkey Man – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
