Vince Vaughn’s Bad Monkey ain’t half bad

Vince Vaughn is not entirely in his “You’re so money!” or “Earmuffs!” or “Dorothy Mantooth is a saint!” mode in Bad Monkey, which premieres August 14 on Apple TV+. But the actor may have found a pitch-perfect onscreen surrogate within the breezily smart-ass rhythms of Carl Hiaasen’s prose. The script for Bad Monkey, culled from the writer’s 2013 novel of the same name, and Vaughn’s big mouth make for quite the easy marriage, with every other line a prefab cue for his flirty who me? back-of-class routine. With a loose-lip cannon roll, one he doesn’t have to dig too deep into his bag for, this is Vaughn as Florida Man.   

Hiaasen, who serves as consulting producer, often comes off like an Elmore Leonard of the Keys, Jimmy Buffet with an MFA, high on Richard Price and dime-store pulp and tropical humidity. He has a writerly brand that’s gleeful, a mass-market sort that seems to come more from rum and self-possession than anything try-hard literary. Here his words have an ambling boardwalk meander, as seen through the eyes of Vaughn’s Andrew Yancy, a detective-turned-restaurant-inspector—either “food cop” or member of “roach patrol”—probated for abusing the domestic abuser of his “future former girlfriend.” 

After a tourist on a charter fishing boat reels in a severed human arm, he can’t help but fall back into the bad-guy chase though. Aided by a pathologist (Natalie Martinez), he gets enmeshed in a vague real-estate swindle, a plot spiced by strains of local voodoo and that eponymous monkey—a leftover from the “last Johnny Depp pirate movie”—who is ever perched atop a local Bahamian. The latter is Neville (Ronald Peet), the calm eye of the storm, pushed and pulled and robbed of innocence and the easy fishing life after abutting against the greed of his red state’s bullshit. It’s all more than a tad convoluted, but not an uninteresting entrée to the Hiaasen-verse, a sort of soft-boiled or over-easy take on sleuthing. Everything here is backdropped by the pristine clear blue of the ocean, a strange stockpile of watered-down Tom Petty covers, and a gravelly voiceover that waxes deep on how the “Keys definitely have their own rhythm.”   

Developed by Ted Lasso co-creator Bill Lawrence, this show is filled with frisky, wordy, end-of-the-summer vibes and cheeky hijinks. Almost immediately, we see Yancy trying to ditch the severed arm to a hungry gator, then him transporting said severed arm in a cooler next to mango popsicles and blue crabs, and then him reaming out a restauranteur for hosting a “day spa for rats.” 

Like everything with Vaughn, watching this is a bit like hanging out with a likable but mouthy mother-in-law. And the mileage can vary: How many smart-aleck retorts are too many? When is too soon for another loaded tete-a-tete? Is it believable that every interaction is but an opportunity to flirt or fight, fuck or finagle? Every one of his back and forths seems to end with some form of “there’s no back and forth.” The bristling waves of his charm, or the “monkey of it all,” only go so far. One begins to feel the fried-seafood bloat, each additional mouth-run like the last guest at the BBQ. Hour episodes feel at least that, especially considering there is not a whole lot going on beyond standard Law & Order-type work. It is a narrative vein that maybe works best in short bursts, one that reads better. “I’m not great with silences,” Yancy says. No kidding.   

But there is an undeniably zany and sexy gaggle with which to witness Vaughn patter and verbally ping pong—namely, the partner (the always enjoyable John Ortiz), the sidepiece (a mysterious Michelle Monaghan), the daughter of the dead guy (a smart-mouthed Charlotte Lawrence), the dickhead boss (an amusingly histrionic Todd Allen Durkin), and the girlfriend of a murdered deck mate (a charmingly naive Nina Grollman).  They make for a solid blunt rotation as our guy makes his way through swamplandia’s twists and turns and shrimp-and-beer joints.  

But it is a lot. After he gets bitten in ass—literally—by a dog, Yancy stops the bleeding long enough to get his ride to pull over so he can dislodge and chuck a rival detective’s mailbox. “Oh my god, this guy!” Indeed. He’s a character that celebrates, toasts, then sets fire to the little moments. For the most part, this is a television season of low-tide stakes, seagulls and steel drums and swells and cicadas. There are palm trees and sunset glasses of Bordeaux, a favorite Adirondack chair and plenty of Wayfarers, and gray-haired retirees who can identify a type of shark by their teeth. You can practically smell the charter fishing boat gas. Florida is a strange, divisive place, but Bad Monkey, while not as propulsive as the book, gives it a mostly pleasant and palatable time in the sun.    

Bad Monkey premieres August 14 on Apple TV+