I can't lie, it has taken me a while to get on board with the “Dev Patel needs to be Bond” train. Monkey Man, then, will surely make a convert of anyone. In the post-having-seen-Monkey-Man world, I have become utterly convinced that to choose anyone else for the role would be a tragically missed opportunity—sorry, Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
It's not even that Monkey Man is all that Bond-y. Patel's directorial debut is a frenetic, kinetic action revenge joint set in India, in which Patel's character, Kid, violently tracks down and slaughters the corrupt government officials who burned down his childhood home and murdered his mother. The first image we see is of Kid in the ring at an underground fight club, where he fights a series of muscleheads to predetermined results. The fighters all have WWE-style gimmicks, and Kid's gimmick provides the title; he's Monkey Man, his face concealed by a cheap monkey mask, inspired by the mythology of simian deity Lord Hanuman. His job is to get absolutely whooped. Which he does. Over and over. Many, many bloody noses.
So this is the first thing we learn about Kid: He's willing to take bloody beating after bloody beating if it's in service of his greater cause, that aforementioned revenge. In the meantime, he gets a job at an off-the-books VIP club, initially working as a kitchen porter, and later as a waiter for the super-VIPs on the high-rollers floor. It's a disgusting place—trafficked women are forced into sexual slavery, bought and sold with the ease of ordering a bottle of Bollinger—but Kid keeps his eye on the prize. (Tonally, if we were to place this in an existing Bond era, it'd be somewhere between Dalton and Craig on the dark-and-gritty scale.) The whole point of working there? At least one of the corrupt officials, a gruff cop, is a regular. This is where Kid'll get his shot.
There is a sense, even here, of the superspy about him: I mean, he's essentially doing espionage on an individual level, pretending to be someone he isn't to find information that will help him complete his deathly mission. But where Patel really begins to stake his claim for 007 are in Monkey Man's tightly choreographed, ultra-gnarly action scenes, which evoke the dance-like grace and cadence of John Wick (there's a knowing reference to Wick early on) and the neon-soaked grit of Nicolas Winding Refn. After Kid's attempted assassination of the cop — in the men's, no doubt, leading to a destructive bathroom brawl evocative of the one in Mission: Impossible — Fallout — goes disastrously wrong, he has to kick-box his way down to the street—in a waiter's black tie garb, no less, which is at least a bit 007.
Let's be honest. The first requirement of a Bond actor, beyond anything else, is that he must conceivably be able to kick ass, not least the faceless henchmen the double-O is so often called on to dispatch with aplomb. In Monkey Man, Patel's action hero bonafides are on full display: though not without grounding vulnerability, he's like an unstoppable physical force, chopping, kicking and fire axe-ing his way through a conveyor belt of bad guys. And like any self-respecting agent on Her Majesty's Secret Service, he has to get creative, weaponizing furniture and the like when his hands aren't quite enough.
And, without inadvertently objectifying Patel, it's important to note that it's sort of a prerequisite that Bond is hot—men want to be him, women want to be with him—and he has never been more alluring. He gives himself more than a few glory shots, a fringe benefit of directing yourself. And you know what? When you're rocking a body like that—taut, muscular and lean as a bit of steak— why wouldn't you?
After Monkey Man, it would be very easy to imagine Patel taking on globetrotting missions and face down megalomaniacal villains with aspirations towards world domination. In fact, it's such an impressive directorial calling card, you might wonder whether he's primed to take on two double-O jobs at once. What do you reckon, Barbara Broccoli? The first director-actor in Bond history? You'll struggle to find a better choice. He might've already dismissed the idea, but fuck it—we'd be on our knees.