Vipin Sharma

Dev Patel stars as Kid, a human punching bag who comes up with a plan to avenge a past wrong. The hits keep coming and the hero keeps taking them in this rapid-fire film.The thriller “Monkey Man” opens on a tender scene and a nod to the power of storytelling, only to quickly get down to down-and-dirty, action-movie business with a flurry of hard blows and faster edits. For the next two frenetic hours, it repeatedly cuts back to the past — where a mother and child happily lived once upon a bucolic time — before returning to the grubby, raw-knuckle present. There, the hits keep coming and the hero keeps taking them, again and again, in a movie that tries so hard to keep you entertained, it ends up exhausting you.Set largely in a fictional city in India, “Monkey Man” stars Dev Patel as a character simply called Kid who, in classic film-adventure fashion, is out to avenge a past wrong. To do that, Kid, who works as a human punching bag in shadowy ring fights (Sharlto Copley plays the M.C.), must take repeat beatings so that he can, like all saviors, triumphantly rise. Before he does, he has to execute a complicated plan that pits him against power brokers working both sides of the law. As with most genre movies, you can guess how it all turns out for our hero. More