The first half of the movie is such a sustained feat of imaginatively ghoulish wit that when Monkeybone returns to Earth, waking Stu from his coma and taking over his body, I kept waiting for the movie to go splat. That it doesn't is a tribute to both Hamm and Selick's sure fix on their material and also to Brendan Fraser. There's always been something vaguely simian about Fraser, maybe just the suggestion of a stoop in his broad-shouldered gait. He's a sweet, sleepy, doe-eyed galoot but he has never cut loose the way he does here. Fraser as Monkeybone is more of a show than Monkeybone on his own, a horny little chimp in King Kong's body.
Artists often say their characters take up residence in their head.
Hamm and Selick treat that notion literally, turning Monkeybone's possession of Stu into a comic-book metaphor for the way success breeds monsters. Stu becomes his character's butt monkey. With Monkeybone at the controls, the once ambivalent Stu is suddenly transformed into the perfect media whore, agreeing to any merchandising scheme that comes along, especially the one that will allow Monkeybone to feed Downtown with a whole new batch of the nightmares they crave. But maybe he was just waiting for material on which he could put his stamp. The slight messiness keeps the insanely detailed design from seeming too fussy.