director
Henry Selick
screenwriter
Sam Hamm
based on
the graphic novel Dark Town by
Kaja Blackley
producers
Michael Barnathan
Mark Radcliffe
cinematographer
Andrew Dunn
music
Anne Dudley
editors
Jon Poll
Nicholas C. Smith
Mark Warner
cast
Brendan Fraser (Stu Miley)
Bridget Fonda (Julie McElroy)
Chris Kattan (Stu)
Giancarlo Esposito (Hypnos)
Rose McGowan (Kitty)
John Turturro (Monkeybone, voice)
Dave Foley (Herb)
Whoopi Goldberg (Death)
Megan Mullally (Kimmy)
Lisa Zane (Medusa)
Edgar Allan Poe IV (Edgar Allan Poe)
Jon Bruno (Stephen King)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 92m
u.s.
release: 2/23/01
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
site
other henry
selick films
reviewed on this website:
- james
and the giant peach
- the nightmare before
christmas
|
When
a movie teeming with imaginative visuals and ideas goes bad,
it goes painfully bad. You see all the backbreaking work
that went into each frame, the months of design and craftsmanship,
and it all literally hurts to watch. It hurts, too, when you
have to point out that all the sound and fury signify nothing.
So it is with Monkeybone, a crass and frantic comedy-fantasy
pitched alternately, I think, at ten-year-olds or stoned college
students. It is the very definition of a February movie, a dud
too weak to survive any other time of year (and probably in February,
too).
It's not as though Monkeybone lacked talent across the
board. In front of the camera, you have professional madcaps
like Brendan Fraser and Bridget Fonda, both attractive actors
unafraid of silliness; a bleached-blonde Dave Foley (Kids
in the Hall, NewsRadio); Chris Kattan, whose purely
physical comedy, unaugmented by special effects, is the best
thing in the movie; Giancarlo Esposito and Rose McGowan (the
latter in a fetching cat costume) as denizens of a psychological
netherworld; and Whoopi Goldberg as Death, seeming like the center
square in a Dali-esque version of Hollywood Squares.
Behind the camera, more promisingly, we have the stop-motion
animator Henry Selick, who breathed life into the creations of
Tim Burton and Roald Dahl in Nightmare
Before Christmas and James and
the Giant Peach. Working to a greater extent with live
action for the first time, Selick and his army of designers cram
a prodigious volume of beasts and tortured architecture into
every possible frame. The result should be a dark-fantasy joyride
to bring tears of envy to Terry Gilliam's eyes, a shoot-the-works
lollapalooza of dream logic.
It's a lollapalooza, all right. Elbowing all the flashy visuals
out of the way, we find a rather sorry plot. Cartoonist Stu Miley
(Fraser) is on the eve of uneasy success: his creation "Monkeybone,"
a sort of Spike & Mike expression of his repressed
id, has won a spot on the Comedy Channel's schedule. Just as
he's about to pop the question to his girlfriend Julie (Fonda),
Stu is knocked into a coma. His coma-induced inner life looks
like a cross between the busy otherworlds of Beetlejuice
and Cool World, and there he meets his creation and nemesis
Monkeybone (voice by John Turturro), who wants to take over Stu's
body before Stu's sister (Megan Mullaly of Will & Grace)
pulls the plug on him. Are you laughing yet?
Monkeybone establishes a sophomoric tone early on (in
an admittedly amusing toon equating Monkeybone to Stu's libido)
and never transcends it. By the time the bogus Stu (with Monkeybone
controlling his body, while the real Stu stews in limbo) is playing
with farting Monkeybone dolls and hatching a diabolical plan
around them, you've given up on the movie, unless you're ten
years old or stoned, or both. The comedy feels increasingly thin
and labored; the actors, particularly poor Brendan Fraser, flail
around sweating for big laughs, winning polite chuckles at best,
like conscientious Saturday Night Live guest hosts trapped
in an especially lame sketch. Only Chris Kattan, as a re-animated
gymnast with a broken neck, scores with his aforementioned physical
inventiveness, but it's too little, too late.
It's obvious from this movie (and from the shabby live-action
framing sequences of James and the Giant Peach) that Henry
Selick doesn't do people; he functions best in a tiny stop-motion
world powered by the imagination of people who think with their
eyes or indulge their wit, like Burton and Dahl. (The script
here is credited to Sam Hamm, adapting the comic book Dark
Town by Kaja Blackley; I haven't read it, but I hope it's
better than this.) Monkeybone shows a lot of talented
people busting a gut to zap a very dead Frankenstein's monster
into life. The scattered nice touches (I liked the nightmare
prison inhabited by such people as Jack the Ripper, Edgar Allan
Poe, and Stephen King) only make you cringe all the more at the
first-grade-level stuff about Monkeybone dolls that emit noxious
gas when you pull their thumbs out of their asses. The movie
does likewise. |