Summary
Bad Monkey manages to fine the perfect role for Vince Vaughn as a disgraced detective in a messy mystery that nonetheless has a certain sun-kissed appeal.
Bill Lawrence is responsible for some of Apple TV+’s finest comedic endeavors, including Ted Lasso and Shrinking, but Bad Monkey showcases another of his talents, which is a rare one in the industry – knowing what to do with Vince Vaughn.
Vaughn’s a tricky prospect. Some creatives won’t touch him because of his politics. He has been attached to a lot of really dumb comedies. Craig S. Zahler figured out how to utilize his size – he’s six-five – in the brilliant but admittedly niche prison actioner Brawl in Cell Block 99, but Vaughn doesn’t suit being a straight-up bruiser either.
Lawrence has nailed it in Bad Monkey, wherein Vaughn plays a disgraced Miami detective who’s funny without being silly, not unattractive but rarely cool, and capable without being an author-insert. He mostly just chills in the sun, has a feisty relationship with Michelle Monaghan and annoys people by sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. This all suits Vaughn down to the ground, and more to the point his easy charisma papers over a lot of cracks that emerge in a mystery revolving around severed arms, dodgy land deals, magical rituals, and, yes, a monkey.
Based on the same-titled novel by Carl Hiaasen, Bad Monkey is a comedy-thriller, but it leans more towards the laughs than the thrills. Andrew Yancy (Vaughn) has been stripped of his badge and gun and sent down to the Keys to get some sun and stay out of trouble. He struggles with the former thanks to his neighbor Evan Shook (Alex Moffat) building a giant luxury mansion next door to his beach house, and the latter thanks to a severed arm that is fished up by a newlywed and promptly finds its way to Yancy courtesy of his old partner, Rogelio (John Ortiz), who wants him to drive it up to Miami in the hopes that it can become someone else’s problem.
Vince Vaughn as Andrew Yancy in Bad Monkey | Image via Apple TV+
Yancy and Miami’s medical examiner Rosa (Natalie Martinez) think something is amiss with the arm, the middle finger of which is being held defiantly aloft by rigor mortis, and indeed with the wife of the arm’s owner, Eve (Meredith Hagner), whose grieving process involves jetting off to the Bahamas with a land developer named Christopher (Rob Delaney). The Bahamas is the home of a fisherman named Neville (Ronald Peet) who is inclined to turn to the local “Dragon Queen” (Jodie Turner-Smith) for supernatural help in making sure Christopher’s real estate plans don’t oust him from his home.
Griggs (long-time simian actor Crystal) is Neville’s pet, the titular “bad monkey”, who doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything, at least until the show’s narrator, Captain Fitzpatrick (Tom Nowicki), explains that these two quite separate stories are strands of a much bigger single narrative. But the particulars of how things overlap don’t become clear until later.
This structure is part of the reason why Bad Monkey is better as a laidback Vince Vaughn vehicle than it is as a proper mystery since the stakes never seem obvious and the twists can be needlessly confusing in their execution. After an episode or two, I realized I didn’t especially care about the plot; I just wanted to chill with the ensemble, especially in slightly different configurations as their paths intertwine here and there thanks to unexpected and sometimes slapsticky circumstances.
The internal contradiction here is that this is a mystery with the vibe of a show that can’t be bothered to solve one. This manifests in a variety of ways, but mostly in lurching scene and POV switches that occasionally remind us we’re supposed to be a bit more worried about things. The Bahamas-set stuff has a touch of dark supernaturalism about it that is totally at odds with everything else, much like how Meredith Hagner seems to be in a completely different show to Joe Delaney, despite their characters being in cahoots.
But the cast is just so enjoyable, especially coupled with a sun-kissed backdrop that it feels like should be enjoyed with a cocktail in complete recline. And it’s always great to see Michelle Monaghan in things.
There are better satires than Bad Monkey, and much better mysteries and comedies. But there aren’t too many shows that manage to find the exact right cast to play the exact right beats to the exact right tone; flaws notwithstanding, there’s something very specifically enjoyable about this series that one suspects will make it a quiet hit for Apple TV+. And it could always use a couple more of those.
Read More: Bad Monkey Episode 1 & 2 Recap
