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aving recently graduated from crane academy and scored themselves jobs at the Slate Rock Quarry, roommates and best buds Fred Flintstone (Addy) and Barney Rubble (Baldwin) also find themselves in the position of being babe-less. Meanwhile, a young Wilma Slaghoople (Johnston) finds herself suffocated by her upper-class family, friends and suitor, the slick Chip Rockefeller. So Wilma does what any sensible, modern Stone Age woman would do: runs away from her palatial home to the town of Bedrock.
She ends up at the Bronto King burger joint and gains the sympathy of a waitress by the name of Betty O'Shale (Krakowski), who thinks the runaway is "caveless" and invites Wilma to stay with her until she gets back on her feet. Betty even gets Wilma a job at Bronto King, which is where the two eventually meet Fred and Barney, who somehow succeed in asking the girls out on a double date.
Though Betty is technically Fred's date and Wilma Barney's, in short order everyone realizes who really digs who, and all goes hunky-dory until the other three are thrown by the discovery that Wilma is actually quite upper-crust. It's then that Chip steps back onto the scene and hatches a plot to ruin Fred and win Wilma's affections. He invites the two couples to the opening of his new casino in Rock Vegas, where they'll stay as his "honored guests."
But all goes awry in the prehistoric city of sin. Barney loses Betty to a famous rock star (Mick Jagged of The Stones), Fred ends up more than a million "clams" in the hole, and it looks like Chip's plan to persuade Wilma to marry him may be working. And when Fred and Barney eventually land themselves in jail, it's going to take nothing short of a miracle to make everything right again.
Yes, they made another one
Director Brian Levant's follow-up/prequel to his 1994 live-action offering of The Flintstones is, unfortunately, an evolutionary step backward for the franchise.
While Addy's got the Fred Flintstone voice down (especially well for a Brit) and Krakowski's Betty is cute and appealing, Baldwin's Barney is just plain dim (on many levels) and Johnston's Wilma is remarkably flat and character-less. All the performances in this Flintstones installment, as a matter of fact, seem to be missing what energy, sharpness and wit that could be said to exist in the 1994 film. Alan Cumming, doubling as both the rock star Mick Jagged and The Great Gazoo, a diminutive alien being who has come to Earth to study the mating rituals of humans (and to berate them), is something of an exception to this rule.
The progression of Viva Rock Vegas's plot is riddled with numerous awkwardly played out scenes and is, along with the dialogue, mostly predictable and cheesy.
The overall artistic design of the film--though more colorful--also leaves something to be desired when compared to the look of the previous movie, and while the Dino animations and The Great Gazoo effects are fairly good, most of the film's digital effects are less than impressive given today's standards.
Viva Rock Vegas is the strange result of what happens when moviemakers try to adapt an early-1960s cartoon based on a 1950s domestic comedy for a 21st-century audience. The result is an unappealing mix of adult and childish humor and outmoded social sensibilities. There is also something vaguely offensive in the creators' choice of making all "the help" in various scenes either Neanderthals or orangutans. Maybe it's time to relegate The Flintstones to a page right out of history ... again.
It was bad. Then it got worse. Then came a musical number. Ugh. -- Matt
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