If you are thinking Monkeybone is the kind of film with a title that lends itself to double entendres about the male anatomy, you are a) correct and b) probably too sophisticated to enjoy the movie anyway. Then again, even if you're reading this review during a commercial break from Hee-Haw, prepare to be disappointed by Monkeybone.
Nine years ago a Barry Levinson movie called Toys was unleashed upon unsuspecting audiences. It had an impressive cast and created its own visually unique universe, while somehow managing to be mind-numbingly tedious. Monkeybone follows the same path, looking great but stinking to high heaven.
The film opens by throwing us into the lives of mild-mannered cartoonist Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser) and his girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda), to whom he will soon propose marriage. Based on the graphic novel Dark Town, the movie consistently behaves as if we should already be familiar with its characters and dispenses with the formality of introducing them in any depth.
Stu and Julie met when he came to her sleep clinic with chronic nightmares. He has since channeled his negative energy into a subversive comic strip called "Monkeybone," and its title character is on the verge of making him a rich man. (The very first scene of the movie is a crude cartoon explaining the origin of the pesky primate's name.)
Wary of selling out, Stu flees a merchandising party, has a wreck when a "Monkeybone" toy prototype inflates itself in his car and spends most of the film in a coma. With his body confined to a hospital bed, Stu's mind wakes up in a freak-show dreamland dubbed "DownTown," which looks like what you might get if Tim Burton and the ghost of Fellini joined forces to remake a '60s head-trip movie.
Director Henry Selick, who helmed the stop-motion production of Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, presents us with plenty of visual stimulation, but in a way that is disjointed and superficial, signifying nothing.
The plot, such that there is, finds Stu fighting to wake up from his surreal surrounding before his fidgety sister pulls the plug on his life support. The denizens of "DownTown" want to keep him there so he can generate nightmare ideas for them, but Julie wants to use a nightmare-inducing chemical to jolt him back to reality.
Among the oddballs he meets while unconscious are a devil (maybe a minotaur; I'm not quite sure) played by Giancarlo Esposito and Death, embodied by Whoopi Goldberg. As it is, Goldberg will no doubt be listing this endeavor as a footnote on her filmography, right between Bogus and Theodore Rex.
The underlying problem with Monkeybone is it does nothing to induce us to care for any of its characters. Even the title figure, an animated creature voiced by John Turturro, comes across as flat and underdeveloped.
Chris Kattan gives an amusing but brief performance as a man who's not all there and there's a humorous sequence involving a dog's nightmare, but beyond that, Monkeybone is a wasteland of miscalculations, artifice and ineptitude.
Its heavy-handed subtext concerning repression and creativity, presumably not intended to be funny, is almost the only part of the film worthy of laughter.
One can only conclude that when the movie was conceptualized, all concerned were asleep at the wheel.
Grade: D-
(PG-13, 93 minutes)
