Streaming: Monkey Man and the best revenge movies

Dev Patel’s seething directorial debut joins a thriving genre, from the bloody violence of Tarantino and John Wick to the comic rage of The First Wives Club

In real life, most of us don’t get that many opportunities to exact revenge on someone. A passive-aggressive comeback maybe, but that’s not quite the same. In the movies, however, as in Greek mythology, vengeance is one of the driving forces of storytelling: revenge films, both aggressively bloody and more benign, provide cathartic wish-fulfilment for our own petty grievances and unsettled scores. In Dev Patel’s seething directorial debut Monkey Man, the quest is familiar – as his streetwise hero seeks retribution for his mother’s murder – but the sheer gusto of his vengeance is invigorating, down to driving a dagger into a villain’s throat with his teeth.

The modern revenge movie is largely characterised by such kinetic action and extreme violence, best exemplified by the John Wick franchise (directly namechecked in Monkey Man), which has whipped up a positively balletic frenzy of bloodshed over 10 years and four films, all over the most modest and sympathetic of causes: a dead dog. Quentin Tarantino, meanwhile, played his own part in setting that template: revenge missions recur through a filmography built on the tropes of scruffy exploitation cinema, polished until they gleam. Django Unchained, a western following a freed slave on the warpath, aims for some social import, though I prefer the visceral simplicity of his splendid Kill Bill films, the very title of which sets out the one-track objective for Uma Thurman’s savaged, sword-wielding Bride – even if plenty of other people get killed along the way, most inventively so.

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