Dev Patel’s ‘Monkey Man’ Pulls No Punches and is All Vengeance, All the Time

In the opening moments of Monkey Man, our protagonists takes a beating and spits out a mouthful of blood before he speaks his first words on screen. It is a bold statement that the story is going to be told mostly through brutality and hallmark visuals than it will be through exposition. Sometimes, this is very effective and compelling. But sometimes, the action and style compensate for the thinness of the story or to bridge gaps in logic it would rather you skip past. However, Dev Patel’s vision is always on display, always slick with environment and care, no matter how bloody it gets. Though we first truly meet Kid, Dev Patel’s character who I believe never gets a more personal name, in a ring being paid to take a beating, early flashbacks begin to spell out the events that led Kid here. The pacing is well constructed, giving us just enough pieces without the whole bag to show us Kid once had a mother who cared very deeply for him. As more story is revealed as to what happened to Kid when they were, yeah, a kid, his mother and their village, the absolute rage that grown up Kid operates with becomes more and more justified. And, there be rage here. Fueled by the story told to him by his mother, Kid remembers Hanuman. The monkey who had ambitions to eat the sun but was punished by the gods for it. There isn’t a lot of standout acting, quite honestly, the camera doesn’t really linger on anyone else for too long outside of Kid to make an impact. But Patel is so dialed in as a…