‘Bad Monkey’ Gives Vince Vaughn’s World Weariness A Touch Of Warmth — And It’s His Best Role in Years

In his first scene on the new TV show Bad Monkey , Vince Vaughn strolls out to the beach outside of his home and plops down into an Adirondack chair with a drink. It’s a fitting entrance for Vaughn’s later-period comedy image, which after a hot streak in the 2000s took on a kind of lackadaisical CBS-sitcom quality in vehicles like The Internship , Delivery Man , and Unfinished Business , only without even managing the clockwork adherence to punchlines that network sitcoms typically provide. In the meantime, he indulged what you might call his CBS-drama side, appearing in more serious roles where he would take on positions of authority, like his military role in pal Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge – and opposite Gibson, playing a cop in the crime picture Dragged Across Concrete . In other words, roles with a cranky-conservative bent. Whether half-assedly going for laughs or taking things more seriously, the live-wire motormouth from Swingers had downshifted.

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Some of these turns are among Vaughn’s best; he’s especially excellent in Concrete . And to be fair, even at his peak popularity, Vaughn wasn’t always revving up like his characters in Swingers , the 1996 comedy that broke him out in Hollywood, or Made , its 2001 companion piece where he talks even more of his signature talk. By the time he reached 2004, the year that his generation of so-called Frat Pack comedians took over Hollywood, Vaughn could operate in a number of different comic modes beyond the gangly schemer goading a more cautious guy into half-cocked action.

Look at his work throughout the three 2004 comedies that mixed and matched Vaughn, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, and usually a Wilson brother, in parts varying from lead to cameo. As the villain in Starsky & Hutch , he does some of that classic Vaughn yammering, albeit with a cruel streak. In Anchorman , he has a walk-on playing the deliciously named Wes Mantooth, apoplectic blood-rival of Ron Burgundy, replacing Vaughn’s usual coolness with white-hot hatred. And Dodgeball has him assume a sort of Bill Murray role as a laid-back gym owner who must lead a team of misfits to victory.

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bad Monkey’ On Apple TV+, Where Vince Vaughn Is An Ex-Police Detective Who Investigates A Murder In The Florida Keys

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This was all prelude to his 2005 smash Wedding Crashers , which revived his Swingers persona as a motormouthed womanizer. But with Vaughn’s surprise domestication at the end of that film came an on-screen progression, too: The Break-Up , Four Christmases , and Couples Retreat were all hits, but often cast Vaughn as a kind of listlessly put-upon boyfriend or husband. The demeanor wasn’t all that different from his work Dodgeball , where he often looks as if he’d be happy to head home early and take a nap. But without zanier counterpoints in the supporting cast (or without especially funny ones, anyway), Vaughn started to feel more sour than sardonic. He often assumed the vibe of a disengaged dad tooling around his suburban neighborhood, muttering complaints about the kids and/or his lawn, hoping someone will listen to him again. (Spiritually, this is more or less the plot of The Watch , a mildly underrated but still disappointing team-up of Vaughn, Stiller, and Jonah Hill.)

In his last foray into live-action television, Vaughn leaned into that sourness and turned it soul-sick, with a turn in the second season of True Detective that was acclaimed by some, laughed off the screen by others. (It didn’t help that even within the dark universe of True Detective , Colin Farrell gave the funnier performance.) In Bad Monkey , though, finally feels like it’s bringing Vaughn into middle age gracefully, while retaining the charm that made him a star to begin with. As Andrew Yancy, a suspended police officer who begins his own investigation of a tricky murder case in order to get back into his department’s good graces, Vaughn issues his wisecracks and asides more deliberately; he’s long since passed the rambling-discursive-monologue phase of his career, where his words seemed to pull his half-formed schemes along with them as they changed shape, sometimes mid-sentence. He maintains the world-weariness that’s crept into his later period work, too, but with a warmth, even mischievousness, often missing from his recent characters. Vaughn has spoken about the rule-following that has sunk prospects for good Hollywood comedies, but his most recent comic work hasn’t shown much interest in working around rules. Bad Monkey gives him a character that very much does.

Maybe that’s the Carl Hiaasen difference. Though Hiaasen’s Florida-set novels share some DNA with Elmore Leonard, they haven’t been adapted nearly as often (just as Leonard was underused as a source prior to Jackie Brown ), and he clearly has a strong sense of conveying character through witty dialogue, something that’s been in short supply for plenty of Vaughn comedies. He’s still playing a cop, or a version of one, a late-career pivot after playing more psychos, petty criminals, and roustabouts than law-enforcement types, but he’s a cop with Vaughn vibes. His banter sounds playful again. His insults don’t sound like an older dad being an ass to his daughter’s prom date. He looks like he’s having fun. Though Yancy doesn’t have much in common with Trent from Swingers , that’s their intersection point: The sense that underneath whatever bravado or sense of duty they’ve turned into their mission, there’s something exciting in going about their business. They seem to have that in common with Vaughn himself, too.

Jesse Hassenger ( @rockmarooned ) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com , too.

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