Monkey Man sets up Dev Patel as an action star — and maybe the anti-Bond

polygon.com:

Dev Patel looks great beating people up in a suit. In the moments before he springs into action in Monkey Man, his tall, elegant frame looms threateningly, limbs hanging loose and ready, eyes glowering under twisted locks of black hair. When he strikes, it’s with whipcrack fluidity and control, but also emotional conviction — there’s a plausible desperation or rage to the way he moves.

Patel is one of the actors most frequently fancast as James Bond, so it’s very exciting to watch this taekwondo black belt flex his action-star muscles in Monkey Man, a feverish revenge movie set in a fictionalized India that also marks his directorial debut. The movie could easily be seen as an audition tape; now we know he can summon the brutal edge as well as the smoldering looks. On the other hand, the movie announces a restless filmmaker who might not be content to spend the next 15 years toiling in the franchise mines, even the most luxuriously appointed ones. Patel’s clearly got pictures in his head and things on his mind.

That Monkey Man would be stylish and brutal was clear from the trailer. What might be more surprising is how slow and serious it is. The plotting is spare and simple, but takes a full two hours to unspool. Between bursts of intense hand-to-hand action, the film takes its time soaking in richly colored, grimy imagery and simmering in rage at India’s inequality, discrimination, and corruption.

Patel plays Kid, an anonymous loner in a Mumbai-style city who ekes out a meager living brawling in an underground fight club run by an extremely disreputable Sharlto Copley. Wearing an ape mask and going by the moniker Monkey Man, Kid throws fights and soaks up punishment. But when he scores a job working in the kitchen of a VIP club catering to the city’s elite, it’s not just to escape the beatings. He’s trying to get close to vicious police chief Rana (Sikandar Kher), a regular at the club who, we learn through fragmentary flashbacks, wiped out Kid’s childhood village.