Florida crazies and moral reflection - it’s Vince Vaughn’s Bad Monkey (2024)

Bad Monkey ★★★★
Apple TV+

Quite how Florida hasn’t sunk under the weight of the crazies and criminal types it attracts is unclear, but it makes for a lot of fun – and a surprising degree of moral reflection – in this darkly comic mystery. No one can walk a completely straight line, including the show’s protagonist, police detective Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn), and the screw-loose schemes spin out of control as a rich tapestry of characters pursue their confounding goals.

Run out of Miami and reassigned to the Florida Keys, Yancy is in purgatory as a health inspector after a non-procedural encounter with the entitled local doctor got him suspended. Yancy’s boss offers him redemption when a tourist on a fishing charter reels in a severed arm. Bury the case and Yancy gets his badge back, but once he meets the suspicious widow, Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner), Yancy can’t help digging.

Bad Monkey is adapted from a 2013 crime novel by Carl Hiaasen, who has catalogued Florida lunacy for more than 30 years now. The show’s creator is Bill Lawrence, whose own successes include Scrubs and Ted Lasso, and the tone is chatty but unhinged. “I did sell K and E, but never H,” notes a retail clerk with a sideline in drug dealing that Yancy encounters. “This is starting to feel like a very weird episode of Sesame Street,” he replies.

With an entwined plot on the Bahaman island of Andros, where beach shack owner Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet) is trying to defeat an American property developer by hiring a local witch, Gracie (Jodie Turner-Smith), the show has a lot of balls in the air. That explains the one initial mistake: an over-reliance on a Big Lebowski-style narration from the Captain (Tom Nowicki), the laconic fishing boat captain who reported the arm.

That abates once Yancy finds his foil in Miami medical examiner Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez), who is both his love interest and equal in screwball-tinged banter. The pair drive the plot forward, even as a body count adds risk to their unofficial inquiries, but Rosa’s proximity to Yancy and his trailing chaos also forces her to re-examine her own life. Yancy tells her he’s trouble, and she accepts that she might want that.

The show is rife with funny bits and provides helpful lessons in trades such as medical fraud, but it also illuminates the characters in unexpectedly telling ways. One episode reveals the back story of a Yancy adversary, Christopher (Rob Delaney), which builds to a tragic act of betrayal. Bad Monkey’s Florida is built on all kinds of deception, but the truth has an entertaining way of revealing itself.

Jackpot! ★★
Amazon

An action-comedy that lacks intoxicating fight scenes and genuine punchlines, this feature is less than the sum of its parts even as it turns Los Angeles’ make-or-break culture into a dystopian murder game. Don’t ponder the set-up, as the film certainly doesn’t, but basically it’s 2030 and auditioning actor KatieKim (Awkwafina) accidentally wins the new state lottery: she gets billions if she can stay alive until sundown, but anyone who kills her – guns are prohibited – claims the prize instead.

Initially this bonkers premise is amusing – everyday people turn into budding killers; a yoga class gets homicidal at the mere sight of the bewildered Katie. But even as she links up with cheerful bodyguard for hire Noel Cassidy (John Cena), the film gets bogged down. It wants life or death stakes, it wants Hollywood satire, and it wants a deep emotional bond. It mostly settles for Awkwafina’s wisecracking commentary and Cena being a giant goofball.

The director is Paul Feig, who previously with Bridesmaids and Spy weaponised embarrassment and made ludicrous characters matter to the story. His talents don’t click here, and despite a hearty homage to Jackie Chan’s glory days, the fight choreography soon grows tepid in this mash-up of The Purge and La La Land. Katie calling Noel “bootleg Captain America” gets a laugh, but it’s also indicative of a movie that plays like a cheap knock-off.

Joe Rogan: Burn the Boats
Netflix

Joe Rogan is best known now as a wildly successful podcaster trafficking in misinformation under the banner of comic scepticism, but his career arc includes sitcom roles and a long stand-up comedy career. He gets back to the latter on this live special, which if nothing else is confirmation that Rogan should probably stay focused on podcasting. Rogan cycles through all the predictable targets – wokeness! gender! – but his gags are neither illuminating nor original. His stage persona is of the bro happily talking nonsense that you shouldn’t take seriously. That he gets right.

Perfect Days
Stan

A wonderful late career high for the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who was dropping classics like The American Friend back in 1977, this understated but deeply immersive drama spends several weeks in the footsteps of Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), a sanitation worker in Tokyo who cleans public toilets and accepts the world on intimate terms. Wenders shows you what Hirayama sees and hears in his daily routine, while slowly unfolding the facts of his family life and past. Light and music are both important here, and the film uses each to revelatory ends.

CSI: Vegas
Paramount+

Successful American network procedurals have more lives than any cat. If a show runs long enough, there’s always a chance a spin-off or reboot will extend the franchise. The original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was a huge hit when it debuted in 2000, and ran through until 2015 as it crossed Law & Order with forensics-based mysteries. CSI: Vegas is the revival, which debuted in 2021 with original cast members William Petersen and Jorja Fox returning. They didn’t stick around, but after three seasons the new variant is as reassuringly familiar as its predecessor.

Umbrella Academy (season 4)
Netflix

Both whimsical and apocalyptic, with a vibe that equated to Marvel movies meets The Royal Tenenbaums, The Umbrella Academy was a comic book adaptation that debuted in 2019, when Netflix was committed to its eccentric properties. Disillusioned siblings, time travel, and bittersweet weirdness have been some of the show’s traits, with an ensemble cast led by Elliot Page and Tom Hopper. It’s a show I’ve dabbled in, but now that it’s concluded – with a final season that didn’t please all of the show’s fans – it’s got rewatch potential.

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