Avis Metacritic

As a star, Patel has rarely been better. And as a director, he grants an intoxicatingly gruesome vision of the kind of gritty vehicles he could steer in the future.

It's an action movie for progressive-minded audiences who need some kind of relief in an era of instability and terror as well as an action movie for folks who just want to watch Dev Patel decimate every single person who dares cross his path.

While far more grim than one might expect, and miles away from being a straight crowd-pleaser, it proves Patel is a force to be reckoned with, not only as an action star but as someone with skill behind the camera.

Patel’s pet project is as much a mash note to a way of presenting bloody-knuckled spectacle as it is a standard thriller.

With a premise that is as simple or as complex as you’d like it to be, Monkey Man anoints Dev Patel as a new action director and star.

Monkey Man may be an origin story for a future action franchise character, but it feels more to me like an origin story for a future action star and director.

With Monkey Man, Patel offers an allegorical story that combines the technical and heroic sensibilities of his favorite action figures (Bruce Lee, John Wick) with the mythologies rooted in his ethnic identity.

If the results are more than a little preachy, it’s only because Patel cares so passionately about the issues he spotlights and the cinematic language of violence he uses to discuss them.

If you have the stomach for singularly focused revenge and some truly graphic, visceral hand-to-hand combat, Monkey Man delivers the goods.

Man is a true mixed bag. The action is staggeringly impressive, both from a visual and storytelling standpoint, but the material in between runs the risk of deflating the experience via pacing problems and narrative confusion.