Monkey Man (18)

Dev Patel takes several cues from John Wick and directs this action film with a confidence and exuberance usually reserved only for veteran filmmakers.

This extravagantly violent and exuberantly messy revenge saga is set in contemporary India (in a fictional city called Yatana). It’s a place where power and money pollute, and where the poor are not just invisible, they are regarded as being less than human.

Patel plays Kid, a young man with no name living in a fictional Indian city, seeking revenge against the man who murdered his mother. So, he pummels and stabs his way to the guilty party, chief of police Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher). And after that, he pummels and stabs his way to that guy’s boss, a religious leader Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande). At first, Kid carries these stories as a burden, choosing to wear a monkey mask while throwing fights in an underground ring for the shady Tiger (a typically unhinged Shartlo Copley).

Patel has an eye for provocative compositions. Drawing on the work of Hong Kong action, and Indonesian thriller The Raid, he deploys dizzying camerawork that makes its set pieces propulsive