The suggested topic was actually "Where Did Brendan Fraser's Career Go Wrong?" But that topic is based on a faulty premise, i.e., that Brendan Fraser's career was ever right to begin with. When you look at the facts, it's clear that while Fraser is undeniably famous and even well-liked, he never did become a big star the way we expected him to.

And why is that? First, I blame his name. Brendan sounds too much like Brandon, and it's hard to remember how he spells it. Plus you've got Fraser, which everyone wants to spell "Frasier," and many people pronounce it that way, too. Heck, maybe that's how Fraser pronounces it, as opposed to "Fray-zer." I've never heard him say his own name. See? Already I'm giving up on him, and we haven't even gotten past his name.

Fraser first came to prominence in 1992, when he starred in two very different films that would set the tone for the rest of his career. One was School Ties, in which he played a Jewish kid facing anti-Semitism at a snooty boarding school in the 1950s; the other was Encino Man, in which he played an unfrozen caveman who gets found by Pauly Shore. That's not quite as bizarre as Orson Welles starring in both Citizen Kane and the animated Transformers movie, but it's close.

For the next few years, it looked like Fraser was going to stay on the Encino Man path, making cameos in Pauly Shore movies and starring in the imbecilic comedy Airheads. He appeared in barely seen independent films like The Passion of Darkly Noon, Mrs. Winterbourne, and The Twilight of the Golds, but there's no money in that.

The money, it turns out, was in playing cartoon characters. In 1997, he starred in George of the Jungle, which allowed him to appear mostly naked and to be funny, though at least one of those ambitions is questionable. Still, audiences responded, George of the Jungle was a hit, and Fraser was on to something!

When he co-starred in the Oscar-winning drama Gods and Monsters the following year, it was a fluke. Was he thinking of heading back down the School Ties path of intelligent dramas? Sadly, no. Instead, he starred in the silly Blast from the Past and another cartoon adaptation, Dudley Do-Right, along with the ludicrous action spectacle The Mummy.

More cartoons followed: He appeared alongside animated characters in Monkeybone and Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and with lots more CGI in The Mummy Returns. Tucked away in the midst of all that nonsense was another good drama, The Quiet American, for which he received favorable reviews but not much box office. And so it goes.

You can see the logic in forsaking small, interesting films in favor of large, dumb ones if the latter choice earns you more street cred. The thing is, except for the Mummy films, almost everything Fraser has done since George of the Jungle has been a flop. If you're going to appear in movies that nobody sees, shouldn't they at least be good movies that nobody sees?

And that's been the story of Brendan Fraser's career: not quite a major blockbuster star, but not quite an indie fave, either. He's gotten stuck with the worst of both worlds.

Fraser's been lying low for a while, but now he's back in not one but two action spectacles: Journey to the Center of the Earth, a 3D adventure opening this week, and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, due in August. This type of thing is fine, but if you've seen him do real acting in The Quiet American or Gods and Monsters (or even the ridiculous Crash), you know he's capable of more. What if he had stuck with that path after School Ties? Would he be an Oscar-winning actor now, an A-list star headlining serious dramas? We'll never know. Two roads diverged in a wood, and he took the one most people take. And that has made all the difference.

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Eric D. Snider will probably never paraphrase Robert Frost again.

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