Review: Dev Patel’s ‘Monkey Man’ Is Out For Revenge On Digital, 4K, And Blu-ray

Ready for some action? Producer-director-star Dev Patel‘s Monkey Man is now available online, and later this month will make its debut on 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD, packed with extra features.

Monkey Man marks Patel’s directorial debut, and is a heartfelt, overlong action film that ends up biting off more than it can chew. In a fictional city in India, an underground boxer known only as “Kid” infiltrates the city’s ruling elite class, with the intention of getting revenge on the corrupt officials who killed his mother and destroyed his childhood village. On his journey of vengeance, Kid makes a stand for various oppressed groups, but the social and political commentary is mostly underdeveloped and it doesn’t quite work alongside the film’s more primal motivations of retribution.
Still, it’s a sleek, fantastic-looking action ride, which includes some excellent martial arts fighting and is anchored by Patel’s charismatic, albeit largely stoic, central performance. Even with Patel nursing a broken hand for much of the shoot, Monkey Man‘s action is exciting and visceral, virtually eschewing gunplay in favor of rough hand-to-hand combat. It even includes a worthy update on the extremely common elevator action scene done in one take. The new 4K transfer on Blu-ray brings the film’s grimy beauty to life.

The disc release includes a slew of special features. Patel leads a group audio commentary with his fellow producers that’s definitely worth a listen. They discuss the surprisingly low budget film’s difficult production and shooting in both India and Indonesia at the end of COVID lockdown at a time when borders were still mostly closed. Patel also tips his hat to his filmmaking influences, both obvious (Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Ong Bak, John Wick) and perhaps less so (Wong Kar-Wai, Terrence Malick, Jonathan Glazer, Bong Joon-Ho). Patel seems quite enamored with the finished film, often saying how much he “loves” a certain shot, scene, performance, sound effect, etc. Yet, he can also be charmingly self-deprecating, as when he recalls how he “wet himself” in his first karate class as a child.

Four featurettes explore Monkey Man‘s origins as a film project, its mythic roots, the casting process, and the performers’ action prep. Patel is joined by fellow crew members, cast members such as Ashwini Kalsekar and Pitobash, plus executive producer Jordan Peele for several behind-the-scenes interviews. But considering the amount of repetition, the four featurettes might play better if they’d all been edited into together into one longer documentary.

An alternate opening and ending both draw a more solid line between Kid’s childhood trauma, his beliefs and his current thirst for vengeance. Additionally, there are over 20 minutes of further deleted or extended scenes that were for the most part wisely cut or tightened up. Chief among them is a brief scene intended to go after the credits, which would have ruined the ambiguity of the film’s poetic conclusion.

Monkey Man is now streaming on Peacock, and is available to buy or rent on digital platforms. The 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD versions drop June 25th from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.