Dev Patel

In the early bouts of Monkey Man (2024), Dev Patel hunches behind a gorilla mask and takes more blows than he delivers. As Kid, he barely speaks, leaving his eyes and shoulders to suggest someone practised at making himself small. We felt for him before we wanted him to win: Patel makes the habit of losing visible in the way Kid carries himself. The violence gives him a different sort of leading role, but the vulnerable man is still there.

In Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), his breakthrough lead, Patel’s older Jamal gives the romance someone believable to depend on. He plays the longing directly, without standing back from it or apologising for its earnestness. Boyle keeps the film moving, sometimes too quickly for its people, and Patel persuades us to care despite the helpful coincidences. That ability has limits: as Prince Zuko in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender (2010), he brings urgency to dialogue that defeats much of the cast. He gives us a person worth watching in a film we cannot recommend.

With Garth Davis’s Lion (2016), that seriousness becomes an adult’s consuming preoccupation. Patel’s Saroo Brierley keeps searching through Google Earth, and the performance makes the repetition understandable even when it becomes tiring to watch. We believe he cannot put the past aside; we still wish the screenplay could find more for him to do. He keeps Saroo worth caring about through passages we would happily see shortened.

Monkey Man makes the uneven writing partly his responsibility: it is his first film as director, and he wrote the story. He shares the screenplay with Paul Angunawela and John Collee, but its wandering, repetitive stretches suggest that another pass was needed. The fights land hard, and we welcome the move from decent, anxious young men to a lean fighter used to losing. There is real feeling here, alongside the need for a firmer edit. Start with Slumdog Millionaire for the warmth; choose Monkey Man if a scrappy revenge film appeals.