Vince Vaughn’s Monkey Business is black comedy at its very best

While away the hours with a pulpy mystery series set in ‘a sunny place for shady people’ and scene-stealing wildlife.

Vince Vaughn in Apple TV+’s Monkey Business

“I went from thinking it wasn’t worth it when I was there – because it was a nightmare – to being really grateful,” Bill Lawrence told Variety of the production challenges in creating his latest hit Bad Monkey shot in Florida.

“All of the limitations became a part of the show. For example, the red lights thing in the show is real. When we got there, we were not allowed to shoot on certain beaches. The turtles were about to hatch, and the Keys were lit in turtle-safe red lights, so it looked noirish. Also, when deer and birds were ruining takes, we just put a camera on them, and they became all the transitions for the show. In the end, it was all worth it. But, man, it was rough.”

I’ve only just discovered this Vince Vaughn offbeat comedy and like so many I’m delighted Lawrence persevered. It proved the ideal way to while away a few days of summer. It might not stick in your mind like last year’s Ripley or shock you like Baby Reindeer certainly did, but it’s just the right kind of pulpy mystery to while away a few hours with a bottle of riesling.

It’s a hoot with twitchy widows, an amputated arm that spends a lot of plot time in a red cooler, real estate operators intent on destroying Florida’s original beauty, drive-by shootings, and those pesky animals stealing nearly every frame. To say nothing of a laconic hero who won’t stop talking, a kinky beautiful coroner always up for a flirty chat, that bad monkey of the title, and a Bahamian voodoo witch known as the Dragon Queen.

Then there is the Florida location, its unofficial motto: “A sunny place for shady people”, the series a kind of deadpan celebration of what Florida crime writer James W. Hall calls its “colourful criminality”.

Lawrence is a Hollywood legend, revered and decorated for his uncanny ability to balance cynical humour with drama in shows that are both entertaining and emotionally resonant. He knows just how to skirt sentimentality too, in hits such as Shrinking, Scrubs, Couger Town and Ted Lasso.

Bad Monkey tells the story of Vaughn’s Andrew Yancy, a knockabout dude who loves his simple pleasures, a good drink now and then, and a chair with a view of the sea off the Florida coast. Bounced from the Keys’ sheriff’s department after an altercation with his girlfriend’s husband, he stumbles on a case when that human arm is dredged up by a couple on a honeymoon fishing trip. If he can prove murder, it might just mean his atonement and reinstatement.

Bad Monkey is adapted from the 2013 thriller of the same title by Florida writer Carl Hiaasen, an investigative journalist at the Miami Herald until recently, set in Miami, Key West, and the island of Andros in the Bahamas. A sprawling, satirical mystery, it’s described as “a wickedly funny novel in which the greedy, the corrupt, and the degraders of what’s left of pristine Florida – now, of the Bahamas as well – get their comeuppance”.

If plaudits, review clips, applause and accolades from contemporaries are anything to go by, Hiaasen quite simply stands alone: P.J. O’Rourke found him “better than literature”, and the late Tony Hillerman called him “the Mark Twain of the crime novel”.

The critic Mark Lawson reviewing Bad Monkey suggested Hiaasen had invented his own literary genre. The novels draw on “the tendency towards extremities of property development and political corruption in a state where both crime and climate were prone to violence and a febrile political culture was encouraged by Miami’s proximity to Cuba and the apparent closeness to insanity of many elected officials and judges”, he wrote.

I interviewed Hiaasen a couple of years ago and said he had actually been likened to Elmore Leonard on nitrous oxide, a description that both amused and deeply flattered him. “I’d like to think it’s probably a pretty good description,” he said from his London hotel room, latest stop on the promotion trail of one of his satirical novels. “But if Elmore Leonard lived in South Florida full-time, like I do, his imagination would be a little different as well.”

Lawrence says he started reading Hiaasen when he was 15 years old. “He’s an icon there. And he’s one of my biggest influences. There’s a direct line between Carl Hiaasen’s surreal satire and insane situations, and the goofy scenarios and ridiculous fantasies in Scrubs.” Adapting Bad Monkey became a passion project for the producer who spend nearly a decade in the effort to create it after writing the original script, the career momentum of Ted Lasso’s success helping the project to find Hollywood’s backing.

Bad Monkey’s episode titles give the game away. The first is drolly called, “The Floating Human-Bodies-Parts Capital of America” and after introducing the severed arm Lawrence gives us Yancy. He’s sitting in an Adirondak chair in front of his little bungalow nursing a beverage, while a wild deer attacks his garden. He’s in his happy place, though resentful of the ugly yellow mansion being sold next door by the geeky, shameless, slimy agent (Alex Moffat).

(Much of Bad Monkey is based on Hiaasen’s own time growing up in Florida. “Everywhere I went as a kid, hunting and fishing and catching critters and all that stuff, is all paved over; it’s all concrete now,” he told a reporter when he visited the set.. “But I saw it happening from a very young age, six or seven years old. And I was pissed off then and am still pissed.”)

Then, when Yancy’s friend and ex-partner Rodelio (John Ortiz) arrives with the arm in the cooler, he passes on the chief of police’s demand to Yancy, “Get the arm out of my town”. No one wants it; it’s bad for tourism. “To get his job back, all Yancy had to do was stay out of trouble,” says the narrator (Tom Nowicki), who’s been with us from the start taking us into the heads of the characters, the voice of Hiaasen.

So, carrying the arm in the cooler – along with some mango popsicles and blue crabs he’s saving for later – Yancy heads for Miami, his old haunt as a one-time homicide cop. There he confronts coroner Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez) with the increasingly smelly arm. She raises questions amid the banter from Yancy – the guy can’t help himself when it comes to flirting – about a missing watch, after extracting some small shark teeth from the decaying wound.

Back in Key West, now extremely curious, he sticks the offending arm, now smelling of decaying onions, in his freezer where his girlfriend Bonnie Witt (Michelle Monaghan) discovers it looking for ice, and flees. (Her husband is suing Yancy for pushing his golf buggy, and him, into a quay.)

It turns out the arm might have belonged to the husband of Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner), who is missing after a boat accident, so Yancy meets with her, ostensibly to hand it over for his funeral. All the while Yancy has been sabotaging the hideous yellow monstrosity of a mansion next door.

Meanwhile in the Bahamas a man called Neville (Ronald Peet) lives in a fishing hut with his pet monkey called Griggs, who he won in a game of dominoes, his garrulous pet actually a trained actor from one of Johnny Depp’s pirate movies. He too is facing eviction from a developer determined to build a resort.

His friends suggest he enlist the aid of the Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner Smith). Trouble is her last three boyfriends, all young and healthy, died somewhat mysteriously.

The two narratives are nicely paralleled, and Lawrence, as you would expect, cleverly and wittily mixes drama and mystery with the right amount of Hiaasenian quirk.

And Vince Vaughn has never been better, or talked as much banter with many jagged edges and prickly swings, evading and retreating, attacking from unexpected angles.

It’s clear right from the start that we have been pitched into black comic thriller territory where the problem of guilt, the anxiety and ambiguity it creates, won’t be solved by any rational solution.

Reading Hiaasen, you just can’t help laughing aloud that “yesyesyes” of recognition that splutters in response to satire, or the “oh, no!” laugh which spurts out of the mouth at something simply so black, violent and outrageous that it lingers in the mind for months. The TV version of Hiaasen from Lawerence and Vaughn and their clever cast had me laughing for days.

Bad Monkey is streaming on Apple TV+.