Vince Vaughn swaps his big-screen comedy next week for the Apple TV+ series “Bad Monkey,” in which he plays a restaurant inspector who drifts into the dark Florida underworld, so there’s never been a better time to unpack the actor’s best roles to date.
In a 35-year career that began with a supporting role as the “Motor Pool Driver” in an episode of ABC’s Vietnam War drama “China Beach,” the 54-year-old dominated Hollywood’s comedy scene between 2004 and 2013 with a red-hot streak that brought us the films “The Nuts,” “Wedding Crashers,” “The Breakup,” “Prakti.com” and “Prakti.com.”
Standing at 6’5″, Vaughn has made a name for himself through his quick wit and quips rather than his physical prowess, and he has the pleasing ability to stand out from his contemporaries Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell and Jon Favreau with flawless regularity.
Although his appearance in the disastrous second season of “True Detective” still stings a little, the star’s performances as Wes Mantooth in the “Anchorman” films, as documentarian Nick Van Owen in Steven Spielberg’s “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” and as Sergeant Howell in “Hacksaw Ridge” must be honorably mentioned before we get into the show.
Dodgeball: A true underdog story
If you haven’t seen this film yet, you should do so as soon as possible. The 2004 sports comedy “The Nuts” is a classic that can easily be mentioned in the same breath as “Dumb and Dumber”, “Superbad”, “Happy Gilmore”, “Step Brothers” and “This Is Spinal Tap”.
In it, Vaughn plays Peter Le Fleur, who builds a wacky dodgeball team to compete in a tournament in Las Vegas in the hopes of saving his precious Average Joe gym with its $50,000 prize money. Ben Stiller is also incredibly good in the role of his mustachioed rival White Goodman.
Swingers
“Swingers,” written by Favreau and directed by Doug Liman (The Instigators), catapulted Vaughn into the big leagues in 1996 and gave audiences their first taste of his unrivaled brand of comedy.
The film received an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and follows the lives of out-of-work actors Mike Peters and Trent Walker in the 1990s. The film was shot largely without permits in neon-lit locations.
The Wedding Crashers
The subject of intense sequel-crazing since its release nearly two decades ago, Wedding Crashers is Vaughn’s high point. The film delivers exactly what it promises, with the early montage of his Jeremy Grey teaming up with Owen Wilson’s John Beckwith to crash all manner of strangers’ weddings before the characters of Rachel McAdams, Bradley Cooper, Isla Fisher and Christopher Walken throw a welcome wrench into the works.
Fred Claus
Fred Claus adds to the pantheon of underrated Christmas movies—Home Alone 3 is pretty good, and you know it—and puts Vaughn on screen with some heavyweights: Paul Giamatti, Kevin Spacey, Miranda Richardson, Kathy Bates and Rachel Weisz.
He is the criminal brother of Santa Claus and has to work off his debts by manufacturing toys at the North Pole.
Freaky
In this blood-soaked remix of “Freaky Friday,” teenager Millie Kessler inadvertently switches bodies with Vaughn’s Blissfield Butcher, a serial killer thought to be merely a local urban legend.
The film was compared favorably to “Scream” and other slasher titles and allowed the actor to jump on the Blumhouse bandwagon.
Curb your enthusiasm
A recurring cameo in Larry David’s masterful sitcom Cut It, Larry! is a slam dunk. Vaughn played the wonderfully named Freddy Funkhouser in a total of 11 episodes – starting with his stubborn handling of the last Perrier water bottle in the fridge.
Brawl in cell block 99
Bradley Thomas is a one-man army in director S. Craig Zahler’s neo-noir prison thriller Brawl in Cell Block 99, and a compelling, offbeat role for Vaughn. The clean-shaven brute is hired to kill a man in a maximum security prison to save his pregnant wife from a drug lord.
We would love to see him in more films like this.
