I enjoy Vince Vaughn in movies, and particularly because he's one of the few guys in Hollywood on our side. This series is based on a Carl Hiaasen novel so typically bizarre plot. Great review in WSJ
Based on the Hiaasen novel and developed by Bill Lawrence (“Ted Lasso”), the 10-part mystery-comedy stars Mr. Vaughn as Andrew Yancy, whom everyone calls Yancy and who at some point calls himself “glib.” It is his only moment of understatement. Yancy is such a firehose of wisecrackery and unsolicited observations that there wouldn’t seem to be space for the narration provided throughout by Tom Nowicki, who sets the hook in us viewers with his crusty boat captain’s catch of the day: a human arm, slightly mangled, its middle finger extended in a salute, perhaps to the boat propeller that—maybe—chewed it up.
How the arm got there and onto the social media of some obnoxious fisherman (no one in a Hiaasen story is just a passerby) is the mystery by which Yancy attempts to redeem himself in the eyes of the law, aka his former employer. Having already been severed from the Miami police department, Yancy is now a Keys detective, although he has been suspended for having pushed his girlfriend’s husband—and the latter’s golf cart—off a local pier. The girlfriend, Bonnie (a deliciously mischievous Michelle Monaghan), is pure trouble, but of a different strain than Eve Stripling (a terrific Meredith Hagner), who comes along eventually to claim the arm as the final remains of her boating-victim spouse, while crying the tears of a Key West crocodile.
“Bad Monkey” isn’t really about the monkey, Driggs (played by Crystal), and the monkey isn’t so bad. But the storyline so intertwines itself with who plays whom that it is hard to explain without spoilers as malodorous as that arm. There are, however, safe spaces in which to clap with two hands: The women surrounding Mr. Vaughn are all deliriously good—Ms. Monaghan, as mentioned; Natalie Martinez as Rosa Campesino, the Miami coroner and matcher of wits who is so delightful you just know Yancy is going to screw it up; and Ms. Hagner, who makes Eve both singular and someone we know, a transparent manipulator and possible sociopath. Running parallel to the detached-arm story in the Keys is the housing-resort-development story on the island of Andros in the Bahamas—Eve is involved with both, as one might suspect—where Jodie Turner-Smith’s voodoo witch, known as the Dragon Queen, enters the picture and thereafter thoroughly rules it.
_________________________ “Remember, remember the fifth of November!"
Posts: 18620 | Location: One hop from Paradise | Registered: July 27, 2004