With Monkey Man, Dev Patel signs a first punchy film (review)

Man is an ape to man. Following this adage, Dev Patel enters the big leagues with a style exercise dedicated to the genres to which he has always aspired.

The ape-man is Dev Patel. Or rather the “Kid”, this clandestine fighter who chases the dream of seeing the blood of his mother’s assassins flow: a crooked cop and a guru in the middle of power trip. Until then, nothing new under the Asian sun; a vendetta like we have already seen at Park Chan-wook Or Kim Jee-woon. However, Dev Patel made this first attempt a perfect playground for his experiments.

Because for a first film, we had to hit hard – especially when we know that Monkey Man should have been confined to a digital release. Dev Patel had to live up to his goal: to make real cinema. And we can say that he succeeded. Infused with the aromas of Korean thriller, stoicism johnwickian and even a little of the glaucousness of Jordan Peel (who produced the film), Monkey Man, it's a summation film, witness to the adolescent cinephilia of a son of immigrants who dreamed of seeing heroes who looked like him, and who, failing to have found any, took matters into his own hands. Or rather, fists.

Convoluted brawls, check. Bloodshed, double check. The prerequisites of revenge movie are respected. However, with this dive into modern Indian society, Dev Patel also has the opportunity to test the limits of the genre. The Kid fights for his mother, and the actor-director uses this arc to pose as a guinea pig in his own laboratory. The body of “millionaire slumdog” (which has changed a lot, and that is not to disappoint some), is marked, roughened, aestheticized to the core. But the body we are talking about is also that of the marginalized, the people from below or next door, from the alley, not to say the gutter. THE revenge anonymous becomesavenge shallows.

A welcome sociological study because it has the merit of giving depth to the model established by Keanu Reevesbut which is a little flawed in that Dev Patel, a (very) good student, perhaps wanted to say too much about the coming-of-age of an orphan, the injustice of the caste system and the need for inclusiveness. An honorable right-thinking, because it is based on social realities, but which waves the flag of pathos with an exaggerated zeal, which we nevertheless forgive.

After all, it's a first film.

Dev Patel loves John Wick, but “the basis of it all is Korean films”