OxfordPress.com

Grade: C-

Verdict: All style, no substance.

Details: Starring Brendan Fraser, Bridget Fonda. Rated PG-13 for crude humor and some nudity. One hour, 24 minutes.

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Review: Another movie based on a graphic novel (a.k.a. comic book), “Monkeybone” is like many of those that came before it. It's a lot of eye-catching costumes and effects in search of a plot. And, often, basic coherency.

Brendan Fraser play Stu Miley, a comic strip artist whose creation Monkeybone, a wisecracking orange tree-swinger, is about to be launched as an animated TV show. Before Stu can enjoy its success, though, or propose to his girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda), an accident sends his body into a coma, and his spirit to a carnival-like limbo known as Downtown.

Poised between the land of the living and the dead, Downtown is packed with creatures from Stu's subconscious, including a cyclops, a cat-woman (Rose McGowan) and a fuzzy satyr named Hypnos (Giancarlo Esposito) who rules the place. Oh, there's also Monkeybone, in the (stop-motion animated) flesh, who seems determined to be a nuisance to his creator Stu. And us.

While Stu's consciousness is stuck in Downtown, his body's on a respirator at the hospital. And he only has three months to wake up before a plug-pulling order from his sister (Megan Mullally in a small role that never makes much sense). So Stu's spirit has to sneak his way into the Land of the Dead and steal a gold Exit Ticket from Death (Whoopi Goldberg, in familiar smirk mode).

As it piles on subplots about “nightmare juice,” and other ragged devices, it never much makes sense. It doesn't even really explain what Monkeybone represents (Stu's Id? his repressed sex drive?). What's worse, the critter is an obnoxious, loud clown with zero charm (voiced without much comic flair by John Turturro). When Fraser, in an extended section, has to play Stu as if he's possessed by the pushy primate, it's beyond the actor's usually reliable comic skills. There's weariness to his work; he seems to be tired of swinging from the same slapstick vine of “George of the Jungle.”

Director Henry Selick is best known for the animated charmers “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “James and the Giant Peach.” He seems less comfortable working with living, breathing actors. At times the movie plays like an homage to the stop-motion effects of Ray Harryhausen (“Jason and the Argonauts”). But the Harryhausen movies had plots you got sucked into. “Monkeybone” is full of half-finished ideas and incomplete gestures.

“Saturday Night Live” comic Chris Kattan livens up the movie's last act, as a dead gymnast with a mission (don't ask). But it's too little too late.

If you have to, go for the eye candy of some of the elaborate costumes and stop-motion monsters in Downtown. But for bizarre appearances, nothing quite beats the real-life spectacle of red-headed, big-gutted Harry Knowles, movie website maven, appearing in a wordless cameo as Fraser's neighbor.

— Steve Murray, (none)