The Flintsones isn’t quite the gay old time it promises

Watching 1994’s lavishly staged live-action adaptation of “The Flintstones” in the falling-far-short-of-The-Jetsons-promises world of today is an interesting experience. Although it was thankfully made before the ironic post-modern obsession with jamming rebooted properties with plenty of mayfly pop culture references, it means there’s no real attempt to update the original cartoon’s cultural touchpoints and so we have The Flintstones’ reskinning of “The Honeymooners” preserved in amber and then mined and revived for the big screen, an adventure $46million in the making.

Fred (John Goodman) and Barney (Rick Moranis) are content with their prehistoric lives, working in the quarries of Slate and Company. When Fred gives Barney the money to enable him and Betty to adopt a baby, Barney returns the favour by swapping his exam paper with Fred’s on a company-wide aptitude test. This results in Fred getting a big promotion and for a while, all seems well. But the promotion is part of a fiendish plot by the villainous Cliff Vandercave (Kyle McLachlan) and sultry Sharon Stone (Halle Berry) to embezzle money from the company and leave Fred to take the blame.

The film really makes no attempt to introduce the characters or explain the world at all. It assumes a familiarity with “The Flintstones” which might have made sense in 1994 when they were still routinely airing in reruns but doesn’t really play that well a quarter of a century later. It also doesn’t help that many of its observational humour is so rooted in the domesticity of the 1950s that there are plenty of jokes we ended up needing to explain to both the Cragglings, especially the littlest one, and a few which were best ignored altogether (a ‘lynching’ sequence doesn’t fly as a joke at all these days and, to be honest, was problematic even in the mid-1990s).

Casting-wise, the movie is absolutely on point. Goodman and Moranis are peerless as Fred and Barney, literally stepping out of the cartoon and into real life. Similarly, Elizabeth Perkins and Rosie O’Donnell inhabit the spouses Wilma and Betty perfectly too. Elizabeth Taylor camps it up fabulously as Wilma’s mother and the other big-name guest stars like McLachlan and Berry are having a blast.

And little wonder, because the film’s crowning glory is the lavishly created sets, props and costumes. On a scale you’d rarely see nowadays, director Brian Levant – a self-avowed fan of “The Flintstones” – seizes the chance to decamp the entire production to the famous-to-the-point-of-cinematic-cliché Vasquez Rocks and physically recreate the whole of the town of Bedrock. It’s a fitting backdrop to the colourful, cartoony stone age contraptions and constructions but shot after shot after shot will have you marvelling at the artistry and craftsmanship on show. It’s a shame, then, that it ends up being a triumph of style over substance because the perfect cast and astonishing sets are let down by a lifeless and overwritten story and script.

Symptomatic of its tortuous journey to the screen, at least thirty-five writers worked on the film over the source of seven years although the version which we have junked everything that came before and started afresh in 1992. It’s always tricky to take a property which originated as a 22-minute short and stretch it out to a feature-length, and although it doesn’t do too bad a job of building a plot it still takes too much for granted in terms of character development so nothing really pays off. “The Flintstones” is still a fun watch, but it never really manages to rise above its roots to become something special in its own right. It’s extravagantly staged proof that a live-action adaptation can be too faithful.

The Flintstones Review
Score 5/10
logo

Related posts

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story Of Cannon Films (2015) Review

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story Of Cannon Films (2015) Review

It's the schlocky horror picture show! If “Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story Of Cannon Films” weren’t a true story, it would be the craziest, most savage satire of Hollywood ever put on screen. Actually, the fact that it all actually happened just makes it satirical...

Octopussy (1983) Review

Octopussy (1983) Review

Grabbing Bond by the tentacles, it's the octuple-entendred Octopussy Roger Moore had taken some convincing to play James Bond for a fifth time in “For Your Eyes Only” and was reluctant to keep going, feeling he was too old for the part. However, with the looming threat of Sean...

Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) Review

Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) Review

Thirty years later, Bill and Ted's first adventure has lost none of its excellence Uninterested in historical accuracy or scientific credibility, time-twisting comedy adventure “Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure” still manages to make it’s warped plotline make sense and entertain...

Blink Twice (2024) Review

Blink Twice (2024) Review

Forgive and forget becomes fight or flight in Kravitz' blistering directorial debut Like a too-good-to-be-true invitation to a billionaire’s private island, Blink Twice lures you in with its promise of sunlit shores and champagne-soaked afternoons, only to slowly, methodically peel...

Machete (2010) Review

Machete (2010) Review

Machete makes Mexploitation fun! Ah, that's better. Leaving behind the pretensions of certain other films, "Machete" is a down and dirty, unabashedly fun and silly movie which single-handedly both redefines and subverts the genre of "Mexploitation". Developed from a fake movie...

Shazam! Fury Of The Gods (2023) Review

Shazam! Fury Of The Gods (2023) Review

I'm not surprised the gods were angry after seeing this Shazam! Fury of the Gods had the privilege of following one of the DCEU's most crowd-pleasing entries, a recipe seemingly simple: blend teenage antics with superheroics, wrap it all up in a snarky, self-aware package, and...

Spiral: From The Book Of Saw (2021)

Spiral: From The Book Of Saw (2021)

All cops actually are bastards in sub-standard splatter sequel Spiral: From The Book Of Saw. SPIRAL may lay claim to being FROM THE BOOK OF SAW but the only tome director Darren Lynn Bousman and writers Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger seem to have cracked open is the “Big Book Of Cop...

Pitch Perfect (2012) Review

Pitch Perfect (2012) Review

Pitch Perfect hits plenty of high notes. Pitch Perfect is what Glee would be like, if Glee wasn’t so in your face about ‘issues’ and didn’t mistake tokenist diversity for good characterisation. Of course, Pitch Perfect has a suitably diverse cast of characters, it just doesn’t care about...