MONKEY MAN

Here is the decision, plainly. Dev Patel can direct — this is a well-produced film with solid acting, and no one is calling it incompetent. But being well-made is not the same as being worth your time or your conscience, and this one isn't.

The story is revenge, and it leans on that revenge too hard. Around it Patel builds a worldview we can't send you into: a Marxist "oppressor and oppressed" frame, Hindu mysticism, and a transgender, androgynous Hindu cult the hero adopts as his cause. Add roughly forty "f" words, brief nudity, fornication, and on-screen cocaine use, and the picture is complete.

So our answer is simple. Skip it. The craft is real and the values are not, and a −4 review exists precisely so that a capable film with a corrupt center doesn't get a pass because the acting is good.

In a fictional Indian city, a young man known only as Kid scrapes together a living at an underground fight club — fighting in a gorilla mask and throwing his matches, earning more the worse his injuries look.

He is haunted by his mother, who told him stories of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey deity, and who was killed by a police officer when the city's elite razed their village to seize the land. Now that officer is Chief of Police. Kid finds a way into the enclave of the city's powerful — and a way toward the man he came to kill. What follows, we'll leave for you to discover.

Three stars, and they're honest ones about the craft. The movie is well-produced and the acting is solid; Patel clearly has talent behind the camera as well as in front of it. That much we'll grant freely.

But the execution undercuts the ambition. The action scenes are shot in a claustrophobic, off-putting way, and the film has drawn early comparisons to the John Wick movies that it simply cannot support — the action here is in no way comparable. The story is confusing, and it leans too heavily on revenge, which flattens whatever else it reaches for. A capable film, then, that trips over its own choices.

This film's center is pagan and political at once. It draws heavily on Hindu gods and the stories of Hanuman the monkey deity, and it wraps that mysticism around a Marxist meme — "oppressor and oppressed" — that reads the world entirely through power and grievance. The hero's fight expands from avenging his mother to avenging every "oppressed" community, and the film treats that expansion as his awakening.

At the heart of that awakening is a transgender, androgynous Hindu cult, the hijras, led by a guru who points to a male/female god. The film insists on this as the hero's cause. Movieguide judged the cult more androgynous than transgender, but read Patel as trading on the transgender fad rather than resisting it — a conviction about the work, offered so you can weigh it.

One detail is telling: in a crowded room, an announcer acknowledges the Hindus and Muslims present, and when he acknowledges the Christians, some in the crowd boo. Flashbacks show Kid as a boy praying to "god" in words that sound faintly Christian — but Jesus is never named, and the grown hero embraces Hindu deities instead. The longing to pray is there; the film simply aims it elsewhere.

That misdirected longing is the tragedy under all the noise. Revenge cannot heal a grief this deep, and no god of many faces can answer it. "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord'" (Romans 12:19).

Dev Patel is talented, and someday he may make a film worth recommending. This isn't it. Underneath the capable filmmaking sits a worldview steeped in revenge, Hindu mysticism, and transgender ideology, packaged with harsh profanity and hard content. So our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something to watch together instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.