Slumdog star Dev Patel steps behind the camera
He may be best known as the fresh-faced contestant on Slumdog Millionaire, but Dev Patel’s debut in the world of film directing couldn’t be farther away.
Although geographically speaking he’s back in the locale of Danny Boyle’s Oscar winner, Patel’s own step behind the camera is set in the fictional Indian city of Yatana.
In cinemas this weekend, Monkey Man is an ambitious undertaking and individual sequences impress with whirling, hyperkinetic camerawork.
Working closely with cinematographer Sharone Meir and action choreographer Brahim
Chab, Patel orchestrates testosterone-pumped thrills and barbarity on an outlandish scale: a nighttime chase between police cars and a turbo-charged rickshaw, frenetic fisticuffs in a private elevator playing Boney M’s Rivers Of Babylon, an orgy of hand-to-hand combat around a prop-laden ballroom. Scriptwriters
Paul Angunawela and
John Collee loosely weave Hindu mythology and socio-political concerns into a conventional revenge thriller.
They repeatedly interrupt dramatic flow with nightmarish flashbacks to the heavy-handed police raid that lights a slow-burning fuse on tensions between the lead character and authority figures who should uphold the law, not wilfully bend and break it.
Patel meets the intense physical demands of his role head-on including an obligatory training sequence that exposes his sweatdrenched naked torso to caterwauls of delight from co-stars.
It’s a part that sees Patel – playing a nameless orphan – regularly engaging in combat at an underground fight ring while he plans his revenge for the murder of his mother Neela (Adithi Kalkunte) during a police raid orchestrated by sadistic chief Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher) on behalf of charismatic cult leader Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), whose insidious influence will decide forthcoming political elections during Diwali.
Patel is in almost every scene and possesses seemingly inexhaustible energy.