Monkey Man review: a thrilling ultraviolent spectacle

Its multiple story threads and attempts to satirise India’s government sit awkwardly with the action, but there’s much to admire in Dev Patel‘s frenzied, ultraviolet genre spectacle....Shot and choreographed with a kineticism that never veers too far into the sleekly balletic, the fight scenes here are often enthralling and genuinely bruising. They retain a necessary sense of life-or-death consequence and of the frenzied amateur using every survival tool at his disposal. When Patel’s character stabs an opponent, he drives the blade in not with his hands but with his teeth. You wince, but at the same time, you want to applaud.