With Mark Addy's tubbiness standing in adequately for John Goodman's obesity, this prequel to the 1994 live-action comedy that transposes present-day manners and mores to Stone Age farce seems to have taken in its raunchiness a notch or two. It still looks cheapo: but that's part of the joke.
This papier-mâché prehistoric community is modelled on the trailer parks, shopping malls and fast-food joints of America's trashy blue-collar lifestyles. It tells how Fred Flintstone (Addy) finds first love with runaway reluctant heiress Wilma Slaghoople (Kirsten Johnston from Third Rock from the Sun) and snatches her from under the snooty nose of Rock Vegas casino-owning boss Chip Rockefeller (Thomas Gibson). But all this churning status quo matters less than the truly awful gag lines based on comic-strip anachronisms ("First cooked food, now valet parking: what next?") and jokes about farting dinosaurs and chiselling the wedding invites.
The antics of the humans - a fagged-out lot despite Joan Collins's gallant substitution of her ever-glowing self for Elizabeth Taylor as Pearl Slaghoople, the bride's filthy-rich, haughty-coutured mum - are occasionally refreshed by the liveliness of a menagerie of Stone Age animals doing duty as domestic servants, cave pets or low-tech household gadgets. Alan Cumming plays a dual role as a Little Green Hover Man from Outer Space who buzzes around observing the Flintstones' mating habits and as a British Rock star called Mick Jagged who wears a Union Jack-dyed fur outfit and looks like a soccer hooligan. At best, it's the triumph of the second-hand; at worst, it's unplaceable.
The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas
Cert: certPG
