“Bad Monkey” gives us Vince Vaughn at his best

The actor stars as former Florida detective Andrew Yancy in the Apple TV+ adaptation of Carl Hiaasen's novel.

For years, Hollywood hasn’t really known what to do with Vince Vaughn. A tree-tall Midwesterner with an everyman face and a rapid-fire delivery, Vaughn was the king of R-rated comedies through the first half of the 2000s. But eventually, the risk-averse movie industry ditched ideas for IP (“The people in charge don’t want to get fired,” the actor noted recently), leaving the Old School star fewer outlets for his specific comedic style.

After two very different forays into television — winging it with Larry David as Freddy Funkhauser in Curb Your Enthusiasm; glowering his way through the dreary second season of True Detective — Vince Vaughn returns to TV with Bad Monkey (streaming now on Apple TV+), an adaptation of Carl Hiaasen’s 2013 novel. The 10-episode crime dramedy, developed by Bill Lawrence (Ted Lasso), gives Vaughn a showcase to do what he does best — though with a gentler, more mature polish.

“My problem is that I try to do the right thing, but in the wrong way,” explains Andrew Yancy (Vaughn), a former police detective living in southern Florida. That propensity for misguided behavior is why Yancy was punitively transferred from the Miami PD to the Keys some years back. It’s also why he felt the need to defend his girlfriend, Bonnie (Michelle Monaghan) from her brutish husband (Jeffrey S. Herman) — an act that resulted in his current suspension from the Key West PD. (To pay the bills, he now works as a restaurant inspector.) And it’s why Yancy can’t help himself from meddling when his former partner, Rogelio (John Ortiz), asks him to do a simple favor: Deliver a severed arm pulled from the local waters to the coroner’s office in Miami.

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The appendage drags Yancy into a mystery involving a seemingly unconnected group of characters: Christopher (Rob Delaney), a greedy real estate developer; Neville (Ronald Pete), a Bahamian fisherman on the verge of eviction thanks to Christopher’s latest project; Eve (Meredith Hagner), a suspiciously carefree widow whose husband is identified as the owner of the severed arm; and Rosa (Natalie Martinez), a Miami medical examiner who escapes the grim grind of her job by helping Yancy investigate the origins of the lonely limb.

Said mystery takes its time unfolding over 10 episodes — but it’s fine, because Bad Monkey is really a vehicle for sand-and-surf vibes, propelled by an extensive and appealing ensemble cast. Jodie Turner-Smith glides fluidly between enigmatic menace and youthful yearning as Gracie — an Obeah woman known to locals as the Dragon Queen — who Neville hires to curse Christopher. Ortiz delivers an amusing, deadpan frustration as Yancy’s straight-man foil, and Alex Moffat (SNL) is pitch-perfect smarmy as Evan Shook, a realtor desperately trying to sell a hideous McMansion next to Yancy’s house. Zach Braff is atypically understated as Izzy O’Peele, a pill-popping former surgeon mixed up in the whole mess.

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Unlike so many of fast-talking, joke-spewing, razor-tongued guys Vaughn has played in the past, Andrew Yancy has a genuine, caring heart from the jump, not one that needs to be revealed over a necessary character arc. Yancy needles Rogelio over everything — his driving, how he eats ice cream — but he’s most concerned about his buddy’s inability to “experience joy.” In the past, Vaughn might have been tempted to douse all Yancy’s dialogue with the sour aftertaste of superiority, but here his one-liners feel more like a peck on the cheek than a slap in the face. He and Martinez have a playful chemistry that almost overshadows their 14-year age gap, which the writers dutifully acknowledge. (“I haven’t had much luck with guys my age,” Rosa tells her sister Mel, played by Gizel Jimenez.)

The story is recounted in voiceover by Captain Fitzpatrick (Tom Nowicki), a local fishing guide, whose folksy asides fit the mood — though they did, at times, test the limits of my tolerance for narration. Monaghan brings a languid sexiness to Bonnie, but her storyline feels isolated from the rest of the narrative. I would have loved more with her and Ashley Nicole Black’s Johnna Russell, the Oklahoma federal agent who tracks her down; perhaps that's a wish for season 2.

Bad Monkey hasn’t been renewed yet, but the finale sets up another mystery… and Hiaasen did write a second book starring his loquacious (former) detective Andrew Yancy. If Vaughn's game, so am I. It's been fun rediscovering why we all liked him so much in the first place. Grade: B+

The first two episodes of Bad Monkey are streaming now on Apple TV+.

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