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Monkey Man is a studied execution of the brutal revenge thriller
Dev Patel’s directorial debut is for the action fans.
Through one of the movie’s first set pieces — a frenetically edited relay race across Yatana that begins with a pickpocketing — Monkey Man shows you some of how the city’s underclass is able to survive and how starkly their lives contrast with those of people like politically connected celebrity guru Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande). In the Ramayana, Hanuman is punished by the god Indra for eating the sun after mistaking it for a succulent mango, and that plot point is reiterated multiple times as Monkey Man plunges its hero deeper into Yatana’s lurid underworld. And while Patel’s character might liken Queenie’s club and Shakti’s towering compound to gleaming fruits in the sky he wants to bite into, in Monkey Man, those mouthfuls come by way of a series of unevenly effective fight sequences that pit the hero against hordes of bloodthirsty goons.
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