MONKEY MAN ★★★
(MA) 120 minutes

There’s a scene in Monkey Man where the hero Kid, played by UK actor Dev Patel, turns down the chance to buy a gun like the one used by Keanu Reeves in Hollywood’s ultra-violent John Wick films. Fair enough: Kid is a fighter, but not really a gun guy. He’s more about hand-to-hand combat – sometimes unarmed, sometimes aided by kitchen utensils or whatever else might be lying around for him to make resourceful use of.

Still, Patel, a resourceful character in his own right, does appear to have learned something from Reeves as Wick about how to conduct himself as an action hero – a role he takes on here for the first time, while also making his directing debut from a script he co-wrote. The similarity is in how he uses his rangy body, the way his hair flicks around as he performs his fight moves, the sense that his character is acting on pure reflex and half-startled by his own ruthless expertise. Above all, it’s in his awareness that the audience will forgive any amount of brutality, provided they keep sight of the pain in his eyes.

Though not a total success, Monkey Man is a genuine novelty, albeit one that blends elements from a range of familiar sources. Going in with little advance knowledge, I assumed from the involvement of producer Jordan Peele (Get Out) that the genre would be horror rather than action – and there is something horrific about the early scenes of a hellish fight club in a fictional Indian city, where Kid enters the ring in an ape mask and allows himself to be brutally beaten on the orders of proprietor and hype man Tiger (Sharlto Copley).

The plot also resembles a superhero origin story, in the vein of, say, Batman Begins: while Kid may not have Bruce Wayne’s millions, he too was orphaned at a young age, a trauma that has shaped his destiny. His “monkey” identity is explicitly linked with the myth of the Indian “monkey god” Hanuman, an affiliation that becomes a source of strength once he reconnects with his cultural roots (aided by a group of hijras, India’s traditional “third gender”).

The mixing of genres in itself recalls Bollywood, and the first hour of the film is probably nearer Bollywood than anything else, with its rapid cutting, raw melodrama and patches of broad comic relief (via Bollywood actor Pitobash as Kid’s far shorter sidekick). But once Kid gets going on his quest for revenge on the city’s elite, we can see that all this was just a set-up for the action set-pieces – and that action in itself is a language capable of transcending borders.

Once again, it’s not a matter of emulating any single model. Some of Kid’s fight moves are outlandish enough to be comic, in the manner of Hong Kong martial arts films of the 1980s and ’90s. But the level of gore and sadism is nearer the Raid films shot more recently in Indonesia by Welsh director Gareth Evans – or, again, the John Wick series, built on a similar blend of operatic extravagance and authentically documented stunts.

Compared to any of these models the film has an earnest streak, hinting at a higher purpose in a way that isn’t entirely to its benefit. The use of snippets of real-world news footage suggests that Patel is condemning sectarian violence in actual India, but how this might connect to his character’s vigilante mission is far from evident. What is evident is the intensity of feeling Patel brings to the genre – and wherever this might ultimately be coming from, Monkey Man in its best moments is quite a blast.