The movie Brendan Fraser publicly apologised for making: “I’d like to take this opportunity”
It’s been a rollercoaster journey for Brendan Fraser in Hollywood, and things will come full circle in the summer of 2028 when he reprises the role that helped cement his stardom three decades previously.
Legacy sequels are always a dangerous game, and since the third one was shite and the actor will be on the cusp of turning 60 when that fourth Mummy flick arrives in cinemas, there’s every chance it could turn out to be a disaster. However, that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to show up.
After all, audiences of a certain generation have a strangely deep-rooted affection for 1999’s opening instalment, and audiences of every generation love Brendan Fraser, so at the very least, it’ll put some putts in seats, and there aren’t many names in the business who deserve an above-the-line hit more.
Obviously, the years he spent in mainstream exile weren’t a situation of his own manufacturing, and there was barely a dry eye in the house or on the internet when he won his Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’. He was one of the turn of the millennium’s most popular leading men, but he didn’t half make some stinkers.
Furry Vengeance rightfully made him question his career, Looney Tunes: Back in Action failed so miserably that it banished the titular cartoon characters from the big screen for almost 20 years, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor was a China-pandering bore, and Dudley Do-Right was Dudley Do-Dismal.
He didn’t feel the need to apologise for any of them, though, which can’t be said of a blockbuster-sized fantasy comedy that barely recouped 10% of its budget at the box office, and swore its director off ever making a live-action film again. Based on that alone, an apology was the least that Fraser could do.
Back when he was promoting 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, the only one of his three releases that year that wasn’t instantly forgettable, which wasn’t hard when the other two were the third Mummy and the literary adaptation Inkheart, he went off on a tangent and quite literally said, “I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise for Monkeybone.”
Helmed by The Nightmare Before Christmas‘ Henry Selick, the combination of live-action and stop-motion was undeniably ambitious, but also undeniably crap. Fraser’s cartoonist falls into a coma and finds himself in some kind of purgatory, where he needs to do battle with his creation, a horny animated simian voiced by John Turturro, naturally.
He branded it “an $80 million arthouse film,” which says everything about why it failed, because those two things do not, and never will, go together. An apology might not mean much to anyone who willingly subjected themselves to Monkeybone‘s 93 minutes and lived to regret it, but it was made nonetheless.
