Dev Patel directing his first feature isn't the surprise here — the surprise is how personal Monkey Man feels for an action movie built on this much visceral hitting. Patel plays 'Kid,' a masked fighter who loses on purpose in a seedy fight club to buy his way into the inner circle of the men who destroyed his childhood village. The structure borrows from John Wick and The Raid, all corridors and stairwells and improvised weapons, but the film keeps cutting back to memories of his mother and the Hindu myth of Hanuman that gives the story its title and its moral center.
The action earns comparisons to the genre's best hallway-clearing set pieces, shot with a handheld, close-quarters chaos that favors feeling every impact over admiring clean choreography. Patel's own broken hand shows up on screen in the way Kid's body visibly breaks down over the course of the film rather than shrugging off punishment scene to scene. Sharlto Copley and Pitobash give the corruption plot texture instead of leaving it as pure backdrop, and the second half, set inside a temple community of hijra performers who train Kid for his final assault, is where the movie's politics and its action fuse most completely.
Rougher and angrier than the hallway-fighting genre usually allows, and far more personal.
This is worth seeking out if the Wick sequels have started to feel mechanical — Monkey Man trades that series' cool precision for something rougher and angrier, closer to a first-person account of grief than a stunt reel. It's not a tidy film, and some of its swings land better than others, but the ambition behind it — a $10 million production shot in a COVID hotel bubble — makes its rough edges feel earned rather than accidental.
Patel spent roughly a decade trying to get Monkey Man made, with the project originally set to shoot in India before the pandemic forced a relocation to a remote hotel in Indonesia, where cast and crew lived in an isolation bubble for months. Patel broke his hand on the second day of shooting and also suffered broken toes and an eye infection, but continued both acting in and directing the film. Funding ran so thin at points that a producer covered the cost of glass for a key action sequence on a personal credit card.
Netflix originally planned to release Monkey Man directly to streaming, but Jordan Peele saw an early cut, came on as a producer, and helped secure a theatrical release through Universal Pictures instead. The film opened to strong reviews for its action and Patel's dual performance as director and star, eventually grossing about $35 million worldwide against its $10 million budget. It's now regularly cited alongside The Raid and John Wick as a modern high point for hand-to-hand action filmmaking.
Patel's fight scenes aren't just movie-star bravado — he's a genuine martial artist, a first-dan taekwondo black belt who started training at age ten and won a bronze medal at the 2004 AIMAA World Championships in Dublin. That background is part of why the hand-to-hand combat in Monkey Man reads as controlled and grounded rather than just fast cutting standing in for skill. The film had its world premiere at SXSW in March 2024, where it drew strong reviews for balancing brutal action with genuine social commentary well before Peele's involvement pushed it toward a wider theatrical run. Patel has talked about how the discipline of martial arts training shaped his approach to directing under pressure, not just performing under it.
