SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains light spoilers for Monkey Man. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
Monkey Man is an action movie that earns its rating via pure ferocity. There are stylish and spectacular fight sequences, but they also get quite brutal. Particular beats of this nature stick in your mind long after the credits roll – including the separate moments that see Dev Patel’s Kid both bite an opponent’s nose off and use his teeth to drive a dagger into a man’s neck.
Those specific scenes certainly stood out to me watching the film for the first time, and I thusly felt compelled to ask Patel about it when I interviewed him last month during the Monkey Man virtual press day. He noted that both of those teeth-centric moments were in the script that he went into production with, and explained that the idea is to showcase the extreme mentality of the protagonist. Said the actor/filmmaker,
I wanted to capture the element of desperation in this kind of thing. This guy's like a caged, cornered, wild animal, and I wanted it to be primal. And, you know, when you're in a corner and it is life or death, you're gonna resort to anything: spitting, gnarling, biting. So in fact he bites someone's nose twice until he kind of takes a bit of it away as an appetizer. It's pretty gruesome. It gets a huge response though, and again with this knife moment. I'd always had that in mind for the film, is to create something really primal with the action.
It’s established early in Monkey Man that Kid has a hunger for vengeance, wanting to kill the people who responsible for his mother’s murder, and that single-minded drive practically turns him feral. He’s logical and he formulates a plan, but when is executing and “in the moment,” you practically expect his eyes to roll back like a Great White Shark.
Dev Patel’s debut performance as an action lead is special, and as a filmmaker, he doesn’t protect the audience from any of the brutality. Not only do we see Kid taking a chomp of cartilage, but we also get a hardcore shot of the now-noseless man bleeding and screaming. And as for driving the knife in with his teeth, the moment doesn’t exactly play out quickly. The production of Monkey Man was far from easy, but the end result of the hard work is a film with phenomenal intensity.
Following a super buzzy premiere at the SXSW Film Festival last month, Monkey Man is now playing in theaters, and it arrived in second place at the weekend box office. Following a turn that critics have described as “a man possessed,” Dev Patel will hopefully get to continue his aim of unleashing cinematic fury and chaos.
