Vince Vaughn’s last foray into small-screen noir was the atrocious second season of True Detective, in 2015. He’s on steadier ground in Bill Lawrence’s enjoyably gonzo adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s Florida-set Bad Monkey (Apple TV+, from Wednesday), a freewheeling crime caper where vibes trump substance.
As is often the case with modern thrillers, the plot is convoluted and immaterial to the fun. It begins with the discovery of a severed arm off the Florida Keys. Enter Vaughn’s Andrew Yancy, a one-time hotshot with the Miami police dismissed for his general Vince Vaughnness (and also for shunting his girlfriend’s husband off a jetty).
He’s reluctant to return to his sleuthing days, but when a pal at the police department (John Ortiz) begs him to lend his expertise to the arm-in-the-water investigation, he can’t say no. Meanwhile, a parallel plot concerns a Bahamian fisherman (Ronald Peet) whose beachfront home is threatened by a greedy developer.
There’s a long tradition of American thrillers fuelled by an underlying madcap quality, from Chevy Chase’s Fletch to Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (subsequently brought to the screen with stoner-ish fealty by Paul Thomas Anderson). This is also the milieu that Lawrence (creator of Scrubs and Ted Lasso) and Vaughn embrace in a rambling story that leans into the cliche of Florida as the wackiest place in the universe (a caricature with which many Floridians are understandably fed up).
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Hiaasen is one of those writers for whom a murder is never just a murder. Bad Monkey skirts subjects such as gentrification, the ravaging of the environment in the name of progress and the pain of being a middle-aged dude slowly realising that their knack for one-liners just isn’t enough any more. It also circles back to a theme as old as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown: that the United States is built on corruption and stalked by the ghosts of its historical crimes.
Vaughn is joined by a talented supporting cast, including Michelle Monaghan as his lover Bonnie, a hard-living cynic trying to put an abusive past behind her, and Jodie-Turner Smith as a mysterious priestess figure in the Bahamas. There is also a monkey, though it takes several episodes before its relevance to the story becomes clear.
The release of Bad Monkey has been overshadowed by a recent interview in which Vaughn claimed that the sort of R-rated comedies with which he made his reputation are victims of studio cowardice. Hollywood, he elaborated, is too afraid of cancellation to greenlight envelope-pushing chucklefests.
He may have a point, though we can agree to differ about how much civilisation has suffered for the absence of a Wedding Crashers 2. But it’s irrelevant to Bad Monkey, a fever-dream thriller weighed down by an often baffling storyline but where Vaughn’s performances cut through cleanly and crisply. At 53, he may have just opened a new chapter in his career as a sort of Columbo in a Hawaiian shirt: a sloppy sleuth who almost always gets his man or woman but, even when he doesn’t, is too busy cracking wise for anyone to care.
