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Monkey Man review: Dev Patel's ruthless killer makes John Wick look like John Inman, writes BRIAN VINER

Dev Patel is the writer, director, co-producer and star of Monkey Man, a revenge thriller set in a fictional Indian city seething with sectarian hatred.

Patel has often talked about his boyhood admiration for the martial arts star, so maybe at some level it was frustrating for him to bumble around as the engagingly hapless Sonny Kapoor in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, when all he really wanted to do was kick the living daylights out of people in his own version of Enter The Dragon. Monkey Man, his debut as a director, takes its title from an old Hindu legend which beguiled Kid as a child and has also inspired his persona on the city's underground fighting circuit, which is run by a sleazy South African promoter played by Sharlto Copley. By now he is the most wanted man in India, but an ability to fight like Bruce Lee, wield a knife like Gordon Ramsay and a gun like Annie Oakley, escape across rooftops like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible and drive a tuk-tuk like Lewis Hamilton will stand him in the best of stead in a film that is undoubtedly slick, stylish even, but disturbingly in thrall to the creed of violence.

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