Bad Monkey Review: Hilarious Series is a Bit Meandering

This drama series is developed and executive-produced by Bill Lawrence. Based on the 2013 novel called Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen, follows a former police detective in the Miami Police Department Andrew Yancy who now works as a health inspector in the Keys. However, when tourists pull out a severed arm, Yancy takes it upon himself to figure out this mystery in order to get his former job back. However, the journey takes him through rather dangerous avenues of greed and corruption that threaten to destroy the environment and land of Florida and the Bahamas.

The series is directed by Marcos Siega, Colin Bucksey, Erica Dunton, Liz Friedlander and Sam Jones.

Bad Monkey Review

Vince Vaughn’s Bad Monkey is a long (10 hours!) series with a lot of things – there’s a murder mystery, there’s a ton of humour and, for some reason, there is some “magic” in it as well. The premise is definitely intriguing, in which Vaughn’s Andrew Yancy finds himself drawn to an odd crime. The crime in question is when a young man finds a severed arm in the open water while fishing and although the police think that the owner of the arm, Christopher, has been eaten by sharks in a boating accident, Yancy sniffs out that there’s something more going on here. That leads to Pandora’s box opening up and more crimes being committed left, right and centre.

The series feels extremely all over the place at first, even feeling sluggish sometimes, because the many different threads that the series has only make sense as we reach the mid-point of the runtime. Of course, as viewers, you know that these stories are all part of one big puzzle but it’s difficult to understand how that connection is made at first. The most interesting of the threads is that of Meredith Hagner’s Eve Stripling and Rob Delaney’s Christopher’s. Their toxic relationship is a very chilling tale of manipulation and desperation and with Yancy hot on their trail, it becomes delicious to follow his process to get to the truth.

Vaughn is pretty consistently funny throughout Bad Monkey Apple TV and I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed this series at all without his little comments. That being said, I found the series to still be quite meandering and slow and at 10 episodes, you start to question why the series is going on for as long as it is. The mystery gets solved by episode 5 and after that, it’s just one big chase after another. Which can be fun on occasion but for this Apple TV+ series, it starts to feel forced and unnecessary. Like, I couldn’t help but wonder about the point of Bonnie’s storyline and whether or not we were supposed to feel something for a paedophile. Her storyline seems disconnected from the rest of the story and its absence wouldn’t have impacted the series in any way.

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Moving on, I really enjoyed the back-and-forth between Yancy & Rosa and him & Neville. There’s a lot of chemistry there and the comedy is also quite funny. The characters play off each other in a fantastic way but I must say, my favourite character in the series was Eve. Meredith Hagner as the chaotic sociopath was absolutely on-point and although she did a lot of horrible things to people around her, especially Christopher, Hagner is a delight to watch. Every scene with her is nothing but fantastic and she will leave you entertained. Eve’s manipulation is shocking and has an effective impact on the audience.

Although I found myself drifting a bit on and off throughout the runtime of Bad Monkey, I couldn’t help but be engaged in the last two episodes. They bring the storyline together well and tie everything off the main plot points excellently. However, before that, we get a lot of information on a lot of things that can get a bit boring and can make you question the point of its existence. So, honestly, the series turned out to be quite the mixed bag for me. On one hand, I found the humour to be infectious but on the other, the story meanders so much that you lose the thread sometimes.

Final Thoughts

Bad Monkey has entertaining moments that are nothing short of hilarious. Vince Vaughn is a fun watch and he commands the screen most of the time. His chemistry with Natalie Martinez is infectious and their romance is cute, albeit it does get a bit overwhelming sometimes. However, there are some story threads that feel extra and bog down the runtime, but the last two episodes are quite fun and tie the major stories quite well.

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