Vince Vaughn
“BAD MONKEY” (Apple +)
Vince Vaughn has been waiting more than 20 years for a role that would perfectly mesh with his droll, super-dry persona. In “Bad Monkey” he finds it.
As disgraced Key West police detective Andrew Yancy, Vaughn seduces us with virtually every line of dialogue and deadpan expression. He’s like a beach bum with a badge.
He’s surrounded by a cast of entertaining eccentrics courtesy of novelist Carl Hiaasen, a former Miami Herald writer whose novels provide a wickedly jaundiced view of Florida’s human fauna.
Created by the great Bill Lawrence (“Scrubs,” “Ted Lasso”), this series opens with the discovery of a severed human arm snagged on a fishing line. The sets in motion Yancy’s quest to track down a missing con man and his scheming trophy wife. His search will take him from Key West to Miami to the Bahamas.
Satisfying from a mystery/comedy aspect, “Bad Monkey” also captures the captivating weirdness of the Sunshine State, that blend of redneck bohemia and big-money crassness mined so well in Hiaasen’s novels.
Fleshed out with first-rate supporting players — among them Michelle Monaghan, Rob Delaney, Alex Moffat and Scott Glenn, just for starters — and you’ve got a show so good you don’t care if they ever solve the mystery.
Liev Schreiber, Nicole Kidman
“THE PERFECT COUPLE”(Netflix)
Okay, I get it. Rich people are assholes.
I’m just not sure I needed six hours of immersion in said asshole-ism .
“The Perfect Couple” is a murder mystery set on Nantucket Island during an obscenely expensive wedding celebration. At the end of the first episode, after a night of partying, one of the guests washes up dead on the beach.
The local police chief (Michel Beach) and a chijp-on-her-shoulder detective (Donna Lynne Champlin) have plenty of suspects to suss out, and each of the ensuing five episodes centers on one or two of the potential killers.
The groom’s parents are the perfect couple of the title, though that’s a carefully curated illusion. The haughty/brittle Greer (Nicole Kidman) writes popular mystery novels, while hubby Tag (Liev Schreiber) smokes pot, lobs golf balls into the sea and spends wifey’s money on other women.
Their son the groom (Billy Howie) is actually a pretty decent guy; his bride-to-be (Eve Hewson) is a middle-class girl uncomfortable with the ostentation in which she finds herself drowning.
The groom’s older brother (Jack Reynor) is a spoiled jerk and financial disaster; his preggers wife (Dakota Fanning) is a social climber who puts up with her husband’s philandering because, well, he’s rich.
The maid of honor (Meghann Fahy) is a party girl; the best man (Ishaan Knatter) appears to be a surf bum but is actually a millionaire. And there’s a predatory and witheringly ironic French lady (Isabelle Adjani) who seems to have bedded most of the men in the wedding party.
There’s amusing interplay between the working-stiff cops and the nose-in-the-air suspects. But there are way too many superfluous subplots, digressions, red herrings and narrative dead ends. For much of the series I felt I was treading water…getting in my exercise but going nowhere.
Still, the performances are good (I especially dug Schreiber’s laid-back kept man) and the faces and figures attractive.
Aasif Mandi, Mike Colter, Katja Herbers
“EVIL” (Paramount +)
After three hugely satisfying seasons of “Evil” I’d like to hang out with series creators Michelle and Robert King. I mean, people who can effortlessly mix demonic possession and insouciant humor are bound to be fine dinner companions.
The series’s premise is simple yet deeply nuanced. Three investigators are hired by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York to investigate reports of the supernatural.
They are seminarian David Acosta (Mike Colter), clinical psychologist and agnostic Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) and lapsed Muslim and hardcore scientific rationalist Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandi).
There’s huge fun in watching the three play off each other…lots of good-natured banter as their conflicting world views collide (think Scully and Mulder plus one). And every week, of course, they have a new mystery to unravel, whether it’s a ghostly apparition, a fierce mutant pig or an ancient relic housing a malevolent spirit.
Creepy special effects and skin-crawling atmosphere aside, it’s the personal stories that really fuel the show. Foremost is the simmering intensity between Colton’s priest-in-training and Herbers’ mother of four (or is it five?) that will have audiences simultaneously rooting for them to hit the hay together and dreading the repercussions.
There are numerous amusing supporting characters, especially Andrea Martin as a no-nonsense nun with the ability to see demons, Christine Lahti as Kristen’s cougar-ish mother and Michael Emerson as her boyfriend, a slimy psychiatrist heading a secret cabal of Satanists preparing for the birth of the antichrist.
And there are a whole mess of demons who’ll leave you torn between shuddering and giggling…who knew that Satan’s minions were disgruntled working stiffs like the rest of us?
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 