Movies

Peter Suderman | 4.5.2024 11:29 AM

If you were hoping Monkey Man would be the next John Wick, well, star, co-writer, and director Dev Patel knows. And the movie makes it amusingly clear that he knows what you were hoping for.

Early in the movie, his character, an unnamed young man who earns money fighting in underground bare-knuckle matches, walks into a sketchy gun dealer's shop. The dealer offers him the newest weapon in the story: a Chinese knockoff, he explains, of the gun used by Wick. Instead, Patel's character chooses something smaller, older, grimier, and less elegant—a revolver small enough to fit in his pocket, good for close-up work.

That's Patel's movie: Smaller, dirtier, less elegant, more of a close-up affair than the slickly choreographed, high-concept action seen in the Wick films. But what it loses in action savvy it mostly makes up for in raw feeling and political savvy. It's a bare-knuckle swing against Prime........

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