RETRO REVIEW
"The woman I love is living with a little monkey that looks like me."
- Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser), Monkeybone
A long time ago... in the 1990s... there were two rising talents in Hollywood. One was a master of stop-motion animation: Henry Selick, the acclaimed director behind The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach (both produced by Tim Burton). The other was an actor who had enough charisma and likability to beat the band: Brendan Fraser, star of such dramas as With Honors and School Ties as well as family-friendly comedies like George of the Jungle and Dudley Do-Right (oh, and the now defunct Mummy movies).
These two men had no reason to work with each other; that is, until, they both came across the underground graphic novel "Dark Town". Sensing a chance to follow in the footsteps of The Mask by turning a dark and gritty comic book into a broad mainstream comedy, 20th Century Fox and producer Chris Columbus (best known for the first two Home Alone films and Harry Potter films and despised for - among others - Rent, I Love You Beth Cooper and Pixels) hired Selick to direct, Batman (1989) writer Sam Hamm to pen the screenplay (and has apparently since retired) and Fraser to headline the film. Selick would bring his expert team of stop-motion animators to bring the renamed Downtown to life. But in the initial graphic novel, there was no sidekick for the protagonist to bounce off with; a necessary ingredient for the buddy comedy Columbus and Fox wanted. What they got was an annoying little chimp voiced by John Turturro with the name Monkeybone.
Stu Miley (Fraser) is an up-and-coming cartoonist and his beloved creation, "Monkeybone" is about to be turned into a cultural phenomenon with a cartoon series with toys and other merchandise galore. This is both a blessing and a curse. Stu wants to propose to his longtime girlfriend, Julie (Bridget Fonda, in her final major theatrical film appearance) and now has the clout to do it, but he is uncomfortable with the fame and adulation that will inevitably come with the "Monkeybone" deal. Unfortunately, Stu and Julie get into a car accident that leaves Stu in a coma. In his mind, Stu has arrived at the macabre Downtown where nightmares are the inhabitants' sole source of entertainment. He comes across Monkeybone as a living breathing incarnation, who begins to annoy him ceaselessly. Stu desperately wants to go home, but in order to do so, he requires an "exit pass" from Death herself (Whoopi Goldberg). After retrieving one, Monkeybone betrays Stu, abandons him to be captured by Death's army and commandeers his body in the real world in order to give Downtown new sets of nightmares by hijacking Monkeybone dolls with fear toxin. Now Stu has to escape Downtown and reclaim his life before Monkeybone makes monkey business for the world.
This is a fairly terrible movie. It is all over the place when it comes to things that matter: story, characters, motivations, dialogue, tonal shifts, set design, etc. Somehow Brendan Fraser seems more cartoonish here than he did actually playing two different cartoon characters. Everyone else in this film looks embarrassed to be a part of it. Especially Rose McGowan who plays a character named Miss Kitty (the most likable character in the film) who I swear was invented to cater to the fandom that would soon become known as furries. The whole look of the film is just plain ugly. There is making charming, quirky and weird stop-motion animation but trying to realize that in a live-action setting is disturbing to an unnatural level. To add to the oddities are the cameos. Selick is good friends with the geniuses at Pixar and a few of their folks appear in the film: Lou Romano (Linguini in Ratatouille) plays a trigger-happy cop near the end of the film and the late Joe Ranft (Heimlich the Caterpillar from A Bug's Life) plays the voice of a street-squashed rabbit. Even Harry Knowles, the geek king of Ain't It Cool News, appears briefly in a scene and even he hated the film upon release. They tried to offer the character of Stephen King to the actual Stephen King, who was apparently up for doing the part but could not make it to the set. Monkeybone is most likely the second worst film released in 2001; the top spot obviously going to Tom Green's Dadaist take on his hatred of Adam Sandler films, Freddy Got Fingered.
Once a person sees a film like this, the question naturally asked is "Who's to blame?" (pitchforks and torches sold separately). While promoting the 2008 family action movie Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (his last majorly successful film appearance), Brendan Fraser seemed to be in good spirits and had this to say to the AV Club:
As for Henry Selick, his career fortunately rebounded with the better-received Coraline (and is supposedly working on another stop-motion film with Keanu stars Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele). But, in a separate interview with the AV Club, he vented his frustrations with the proverbial monkey on his back:
At the end of the day, as refreshing as it is to hear about the behind-the-scenes aspects of what went wrong with a project and Henry Selick certainly seems to have learned from his mistakes, Monkeybone is still such a wild misfire of a film. It is too weird be a mainstream comedy, it is too bawdy to be a kids' film and yet it is also too juvenile to be taken seriously as an adult film. If a movie that thinks it is a crowd-pleasing movie fails to have a crowd, does it really please? To paraphrase Roger Ebert's review of Freddy Got Fingered, "The day may come when Monkeybone is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny." Brendan Fraser's career has seemed to be lost to time. If he ever decides to return to mainstream moviemaking, he would do well to avoid projects like Monkeybone. Fool us once, shame on us. Fool us twice, shame on you.
Once a person sees a film like this, the question naturally asked is "Who's to blame?" (pitchforks and torches sold separately). While promoting the 2008 family action movie Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (his last majorly successful film appearance), Brendan Fraser seemed to be in good spirits and had this to say to the AV Club:
"You're talking to a guy who was in an $85 million arthouse movie called Monkeybone. Love it or hate it, it had a lot of highly technical elements to it. There was puppeteering, there was claymation, there was CGI, there were huge setpieces. I don't know what happened, they gave the keys to the inmates of the asylum. We went nutty and we made a movie. The studio saw it and went, 'Huh?' I was like, 'You guys don't watch the dailies or read the script? Whatever, here you go!' Me and [co-star] Dave Foley were like, 'We have the dubious honor of being in the world's most expensive arthouse film ever created!'"
As for Henry Selick, his career fortunately rebounded with the better-received Coraline (and is supposedly working on another stop-motion film with Keanu stars Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele). But, in a separate interview with the AV Club, he vented his frustrations with the proverbial monkey on his back:
"It's very hard to know with Monkeybone what the variables were. There was a regime change when I was at Fox. There's a longer version of the film. When Hollywood gets afraid of something, they just say, 'Make it go faster.' Usually, faster isn't better. So there's another version of the film that's about 15 minutes longer. I know that it works better. We had a different lead originally, and that probably would have had an impact —Ben Stiller was the lead, but he wanted to bring in writers, and I chose to be loyal to the writer that was on it. It actually would have been better to go with Ben and his writers. There's a lot of variables looking back, what-ifs. But who knows. I learned my lesson that in the live-action world, you have to earn the support of people over a very, very long time. And in animation, I already have the support."But in another interview, Selick seems to lay the blame with producer Chris Columbus:
"I would never do another predominantly live-action film again. It was kind of a slippery slope. The original idea for Monkeybone was meant to be far more animation, as much as James and the Giant Peach, and the powerful producer that I hooked up with, he had his own take on it and, you know, if you’re getting a name actor, you have to keep him in the whole movie. And he loves stop-motion, but we couldn’t actually afford to do that sort of Ray Harryhausen combo for a big chunk, so…no, the culture of live-action that’s all focused on one shot, it’s just not my realm. I’m much happier in the animated realm."
At the end of the day, as refreshing as it is to hear about the behind-the-scenes aspects of what went wrong with a project and Henry Selick certainly seems to have learned from his mistakes, Monkeybone is still such a wild misfire of a film. It is too weird be a mainstream comedy, it is too bawdy to be a kids' film and yet it is also too juvenile to be taken seriously as an adult film. If a movie that thinks it is a crowd-pleasing movie fails to have a crowd, does it really please? To paraphrase Roger Ebert's review of Freddy Got Fingered, "The day may come when Monkeybone is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny." Brendan Fraser's career has seemed to be lost to time. If he ever decides to return to mainstream moviemaking, he would do well to avoid projects like Monkeybone. Fool us once, shame on us. Fool us twice, shame on you.
