Monkey Bone looks like a cartoon, but it isn’t for kids, though it’s full of elementary school humor. If it’s not for kids, then it’s for adults, right? Well, no, because there is no depth whatsoever that could keep an adult interested. So who then would like Monkey Bone? I have no idea. Maybe you can tell me, because you sure couldn’t convince the members of the audience leaving the screening I was at to stay.
We fall right into a movie that seemed to have started a half hour before anyone got there. There is no setup for Stu (Brendan Fraser), a soon to be famous cartoonist, and his girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda). It opens with a cartoon of Monkey Bone. I knew we were in trouble when the cartoon intro, all of a minute long, stunk up the place.
We run right out of the box into Stu going into a coma after a freak accident and into the land of Beetlejuice. Okay, I made that up, but they sure ripped off that waiting room for death idea. Here they call it Downtown.
Stu has to get out of this waiting room of hell and back into his body, but something goes wrong and he gets stuck.
That’s the movie, folks. Now I’ll give you the good and bad so you can decide if the movie is right for you.
Let’s go with the bad first.
+ Brendan Fraser’s overacting and irritating facial expressions fall flat. Instead of being comical they are annoying.
+ The editing in this movie is often worse than bad. Watch as Fraser gets cake all over his hands and face, then suddenly in the next scene it’s not there. Magic? Nope, just crappy editing. Dave Foley goes into the bathroom and gets squirted with purple stuff that goes on spotty, but cut to the next scene and it looks like a facial. Duh.
+ The jokes that roll nowhere.
+ The monkey. Period. He is absolutely annoying.
+ The cameos. How many cameos does it take to make a good film? Answer: If the makers of this film knew, they’d have solved the riddle and fixed this mess.
Now the good.
+Chris Kattan. Kattan plays a corpse, and from the second he shows up in the film, you wonder why in the hell he wasn’t there from moment one. I mean, of course his part called for him to come in at that point in the film, but they should have given the lead to Kattan. He was hilarious. Almost every second of the film with him is joy. He isn’t standup funny like SNL, but his physical movements are too much. I almost let go of the gallon of Pepsi I sipped prior.
The most curious of all is how director Henry Selick let Monkey Bone happen, or not happen. He directed two movies I loved, Nightmare Before Christmas and James And The Giant Peach, that are of a similar ilk to Monkey Bone. Why couldn’t he make it work here? I just don’t know, but it sure went so wrong.
+ charlie craine
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