Monkey Bone |
Apollo
Score:  |
Users' Rating: 70 (18 votes) |
Henry Selick’s Monkey Bone posits a world where strange and
disturbing visions rule, where logic holds no sway, and where events are
overwhelmed by the next bizarre creature or freaky conceit. It is the world
inside the movie, but it is more. It is the world that anyone watching the
movie is subjected to.
All ye who would embrace a film simply for its visual style, be warned: You
will find no succor here. Monkey Bone is less a film than it is a
cocky exhibition of art direction prowess, propping up a story that moves so
frantically from here to there that its script feels pasted together from
recovered shreddings.
Brendan
Fraser stars as Stu Miley, a mild-mannered cartoonist with a successful
comic strip-turned-Comedy Central television series and a loving girlfriend
named Julie ( Bridget
Fonda). But on the day he’s set to propose to Julie, a car accident
leaves him in a coma. And as we soon learn, coma victims dwell in a
netherworld called Downtown, where nightmares are born. Stu discovers a way to
escape, but his exit pass is snatched by his cartoon creation Monkey Bone
(voiced by John
Turturro), who returns to earth in Stu’s body with his own ulterior
motives.
Not surprisingly for a Tim
Burton disciple and the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas,
Henry Selick creates a uniquely inspired world in Downtown: twisted cityscape,
mutant creatures and carnival garishness combining to evoke a never-ending
sub-conscious freak-out. The inhabitants of that world are generally more
annoying than inventive (particularly the dreadfully unfunny Monkey Bone
himself), but there’s plenty to catch the eye. Whenever Monkey Bone
is dwelling in Downtown, it’s at least interesting to watch on a
moment-to-moment basis.
Unfortunately, Monkey Bone never dwells anywhere for more than 12
seconds at a time. Sam Hamm’s script probably was no work of genius to begin
with, but the version that ends up on screen feels as though half an hour of
character development and exposition has been sucked out of it. Where’s the
explanation of Stu’s traumatized past that would make his character – and
the existence of alter-id Monkey Bone – feel fully formed? Where’s the
justification for Stu’s sister (Megan Mullaly) appearing so blithely eager
to pull the plug on her comatose sibling? Virtually every scene in the first
hour feels hacked to a stump. There’s no texture to anything that isn’t
expected to make you think, “Hey, that looks really cool.”
Thank heaven for the third act, which gets a boost from Chris
Kattan as a gymnast’s corpse borrowed by Stu for his own return to
earth. Even with soon-to-be-donated organs regularly dropping from Kattan’s
abdomen, Monkey Bone finally feels like it has found a sustainable
pace, and a concern for its story. For the most part, however, the film is
just a shallow excuse for the creation of a fantasy realm. Monkey Bone
is as id-driven a creation as its title character – pure, unstructured
imagination with a fatally short attention span.
| Scott Renshaw |
