The tale of Monkey Man is a beleaguered one – for the titular character, played by the actor turned writer-director Dev Patel, a slog of oppression, trauma and rage curdled into revenge in the seedy fight clubs of an Indian slum. For the film, Patel’s directorial debut, it took years of laboring to get his passion project to screen. Production was underway in Batam, Indonesia, before Covid, and then “everything that could go wrong, did”, as Patel said at its SXSW premiere on Monday night – delays, movie purgatory, a distribution deal with Netflix that did not realize the dream of having his ambitious action flick debut in theaters.
And then came Jordan Peele, who felt the movie deserved the big-screen treatment and rescued it from the straight-to-streaming slush pile for a theatrical release through his production company’s deal with Universal. The pop-horror auteur was on hand for the premiere to hype up Patel’s directorial chops, and it’s clear what so excited him about the project: Patel, a self-professed action film devotee, has a gift for highly kinetic, brutally violent fight sequences, and is operating on a canvas – bustling slum in a large fictional Indian city, revenge arc inspired by a centuries-old Hindu legend, trauma derived from real state-sanctioned violence – deserving of a big screen.
