The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas Movie Review

All right. I withered away my youth watching The Flintstones like just about every other kid in the 80s. That doesn't mean I have to like the movie or feel the slightest pang of nostalgia. I won't give any special points to The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas for invoking some memory in me of the pre Cartoon Network days when I watched "The Flintstones" on a black and white TV located outside of my room in the house that I grew up in.

Viva Rock Vegas is bad. Real bad. It features the same kind of dry humor that the show did, and thus makes you wonder why you watched the show in the first place. It slowly sucks the life out of you and gets progressively worse in a 80-minute running time that feels like two hours. It has the high point of watching The Great Gazoo, an alien sent to observe prehistoric man's mating patterns, get kicked and crash into signs.

It really, really stinks.

Viva Rock Vegas opens with the standard Universal logo redone in tied-together wood and retitled "Univershell." This provides yet another bleakly high point, as, being tired when I saw this movie, I read the logo as "Universe Hell" instead of the intended "Universe Shell." This brought a small laugh out of me. It just so happens that was all the movie was able to garner up in the way of entertainment.

The story goes as such: Fred (Mark Addy) and Barney (Steven Baldwin) have just graduated from construction school. Elated and prompted by The Great Gazoo (Alan Cumming), the two go out in search for dates. They find said dates in the form of Betty (Jane Krakowski) and Wilma (Kristen Johnson). Betty is very lower class, but Wilma comes from a large mansion on a mountain overlooking bedrock. Wilma is under constant pressure by her mother (Joan Collins) to marry Chip Rockefellar (Thomas Gibson), so she runs away and moves in with Betty.

Predictable, the four fall in love. Even more predictably, Chip invites them to Rock Vegas to attempt to steal Wilma from Fred. A few things from are explained in this film: how Wilma got her pearls, where Dino came from, and why the dinosaurs went extinct (apparently, someone had been poisoning their water supply). To the "Flintstones" fanatic, these will matter. To everyone else, who cares.

Krakowski is delightful as Betty, who she basically plays the same way she does her character on Ally McBeal. Baldwin proves once again why film critics hate the Baldwin clan.

All in all, Viva Rock Vegas is a very bad run-of-the-mill movie with a few bright points, making it a complete waste of your time. It's lame, predictable, and just plain unfunny. So, for God's sake, don't watch it.



Yabba dabba don't.