‘Monkey Man’ Review: Dev Patel Directs and Stars in an Audacious, at Times Awkward Mashup of Action Film and Slumdog Fable
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Enter the Dragon,” starring Bruce Lee, is one of the four or five greatest action films ever made.
Yet it has a thin, awkward, lurching story. The movie gets away with it, of course; the plot is merely a frame on which to hang Lee’s singular hypnotic balletic fighting bravura.
In that spirit, there are countless action films that have functional, bare-bones plots, from the revenge sagas of Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude van Damme, Chuck Norris, or Jason Statham to the “John Wick” films to the action dramas of South Korea (“The Man from Nowhere,” “I Saw the Devil”) and Indonesia (“The Raid” and its sequel).
So when you watch “Monkey Man,” a film that has blistering fight scenes and was directed and co-written by its star, Dev Patel, you’d think that the movie, like those others, would be able to transcend whatever limitations it might have as a drama.
Read more on variety.com