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Promos for Monkey Man, Dev Patel’s long-gestating passion project, have evoked the John Wick series, teasing revenge-mindedness and a brutal, stylized collection of assiduously choreographed action sequences. The final movie takes a playful shot at its most obvious forebear early on with a joke — an arms dealer pitches the kind of big, showy gun Wick might tote, but its hero prefers something smaller and more effective — to show both that it knows how people might be seeing it and that it aspires to be its own animal.

Monkey Man is also, like the John Wick movies, persistently pessimistic, is so action-heavy that you’re likely to leave the theater feeling a little sapped, and has a cute dog the protagonist loves. But it succeeds at setting itself apart from the film to which it knows it will inevitably be compared with a more political bent and vengeful motivations far bleaker, more urgent. Patel, who stars in and wrote the film in addition to directing and co-producing, additionally announces himself as a formidable action star, his dark eyes afire with the laser focus of a character on a warpath and his newly sinewy body convincing as it dashes around in will-do-anything action-hero mode. But Monkey Man also feels overlong for something with its relatively straightforward narrative, the welcome shot-in-the-arm intensity of its extended finale — inspired by the action set pieces found in South Korean and Japanese cinema — preceded by some impatience for the movie to finally get to this moment.

In Monkey Man, Patel plays a young man credited simply as Kid who works in an underground boxing club run by a shaggy-haired Australian (Joseph J.U. Taylor). His mug hidden by a gorilla mask, Kid is paid to essentially be a human punching bag for more flamboyantly done-up competitors. We learn that he has, for what’s implied to be years, concurrently been plotting his revenge against Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), an ultra-nationalist politician amassing larger and larger swaths of followers, and his nasty right-hand man, Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher). Years ago, Kid’s mother was killed by Rana as part of a Shakti-led effort to take the land they lived on.

Kid gets a job working as a kitchen-hand at a shadowy employee Rana frequents; he attempts, early in the film, to see through the vengeance he’s been lusting after. But his audacity doesn’t pay off. His quick-footed fleeing of the premises, so frantic and lavish with close calls, rivals the actual attempt at revenge in its sheer number of thrills. (It’s also exemplary of one of Monkey Man’s most vexing aesthetic features: the tendency to predominantly shoot with faux-handheld unsteadiness either in close-up or tight medium shots, which can mar a scene’s spatial awareness and make you feel like you’re not quite getting the full picture of the stakes in the immediate room.)

Kid is taken in by the leader (Vipin Sharma) of a temple of Ardhanarishvara, populated with members of the local hijra community endangered by the violent conservatism of Shakti and his followers. There he will train, and meaningfully process the grief long tormenting him, into the kind of shape that makes his hankered-for desire for revenge feel within reason rather than a dangerous dream. There are a few too many scenes in Monkey Man’s middle stretch dwelling in traumatic flashbacks; they feel like the belaboring of a point more than they do additional substance for us to emotionally respond to. But that section of the movie, though overpadded, still adequately ramps up what will be a bravura finale — the part for which Monkey Man will be the most remembered. It’s a movie that makes you look forward to what Patel will do next. 

Header image courtesy of Universal Pictures