Despite the desires of the internet, Dev Patel clearly never wanted to be James Bond. He wanted to be Rorschach. Patel’s directorial debut,, fashions its Hanuman-based action hero after the big, brash mythologies of Indian epics and comic book vigilantes. Delicate moralities have their faces smashed against toilet bowl porcelain, and nuance has its bones cracked by a kitchen-sink adoration of grisly action styles.
And those ambitions are shared by Kid , who we meet as a living, breathing Chumbawamba song. He gets knocked down and gets back up again, professionally. When not spitting blood as the fall guy in an underground MMA match , he’s scraping for stolen dollars with his network of impoverished peers. This is all in service of his ultimate goal: Revenge on the men who destroyed his idyllic rural life and family.
Not an especially original premise, and—as Kid infiltrates the high-end club his cop target frequents—not an especially original execution. Kid is a being of endless energy and rage, an underdog driven by a baked-in action-movie assurance: If he just beats the hell out of enough people, he’ll have fixed things.’s fictional Indian city of Yatana, it’s a position of desperate anger, exacerbated by its setting, where injustice fills the air and inequality is at its most extreme.
This overt thematic thrust may compensate for the utter lack of depth boasted by most action movies, but init contributes to a wobbly first half. The pacing hitches, hitting its expository flashbacks too hard and lingering too long with places and characters that never amount to much. We understand Yatana, and Kid’s place in it, immediately. The blistering editing, the dense locations, the bold colors and lights all set up the grim-yet-heightened tone that eventually takes over completely.
The early fights are a frenetic collision of frantic close-ups, slowly clarifying into more visible, longer-take sequences of combat as Kid becomes a better brawler. Cinematographer Sharone Meir allows Patel to follow his whims—shots encompass everything from a camera operator doing fight choreography just to keep up during some cramped kitchen combat to a camera swinging over a Diwali crowd, seemingly dropped from the air and immersed in the mass of celebrants.
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