There is no telling about tastes. Dev Patel’s senseless bloodbath Monkey Man (Dev plans a Hanuman avatar) has been nominated for a BAFTA award in the Outstanding Debut as director category. Sobhita Dhulipala who has a role as commodious as Jacqueline Fernandez in Fateh, is very happy.

I am happy for her. But not quite in the waltzy mode over the film. Watching Dev Patel’s much-extolled directorial debut, rightly banned in India and from Netflix where it was scheduled for streaming, is a painful experience. The stylized relentless violence, with stunt passages choreographed like the opposite of a ballet,are sickening in their self-important gratuitousness.

But I would forgive the endless pointless carnage—to each his own John Wick, I guess—were it not for the strange uncalled-for references to Hindu mythology that keep popping up with nagging regularity all through the sanguinary excursion, as if to remind...