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‘Monkey Man’ Review: Dev Patel Directs and Stars in an Audacious, at Times Awkward Mashup of Action Film and Slumdog Fable
The action scenes are razory and intense, though much of this slow-burn tale of revenge plays like a glum origin story.
So when you watch “ Monkey Man,” a film that has blistering fight scenes and was directed and co-written by its star, Dev Patel, you’d think that the movie, like those others, would be able to transcend whatever limitations it might have as a drama. Playing a character known as Kid, who works as an underground fight-club boxer who gets paid each night to put on a rubber gorilla mask and get beaten to a pulp, Patel creates a hero who is very much not some invincible combat superstar. There are numerous flashbacks to Kid as a young boy, and in one of them he watches his mother, Neela (Adithi Kalkunte), get brutally murdered by an evil police officer, because she wouldn’t submit to his sexual aggression.
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