“We’ll make new friends, there’s 4,000 other people in this world!”

Justin’s rating: The only way to get through this is to be drunk as a skunkasaurus

Justin’s review: I don’t know what exactly sparked it, but ’90s Hollywood got into the TV and video game adaptation market in a roaring hurry. Maybe a little too hurried, with some efforts like Super Mario Bros and Wild Wild West biting off more than their budgets and writers could chew. Still, it was a lot of fun and a highlight of moviegoing during that decade, especially if you were fans of a franchise that suddenly got its shot at a major motion picture.

But Flintstones? Really? I grew up as a kid in the ’80s, and literally zero people I knew — adults or kids — admitted to liking that old show. A cartoon with a laugh track makes my skin crawl. So I have no idea why someone greenlit this and invested a fairly modest $46M budget to bringing the Bedrock family to life, thinking that it was going to be a major summer hit.

(Wait, it broke $341 million at the box office and was the #6 highest-grossing film of the year? Shows what I know!)

The Flintstones is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the old cartoon, presenting a world where man, ape, Neanderthal, and dinosaurs can co-exist in a strange suburban setting. Fred (the ever-excellent John Goodman) is a lunkheaded quarry worker who, along with his wife Wilma (Elizabeth Perkins) helps his best friend Barney (Rick Moranis) and his wife Betty (Rosie O’Donnell) afford the adoption of Bam-Bam.

Fred also gets sucked into a rather lame conspiracy where two scheming execs (Kyle MacLachlan and Halle Berry) set him up to be a patsy so that they can steal a bunch of money. Meanwhile, Barney gets fired and goes through a number of replacement jobs while resenting the heck out of Fred.

As uncool as the Flintstones are, I have to be fair and give high praise to the world building on display in the film. There’s something really delightful in watching the set designers, costumers, prop people, and animatronic makers put their all into creating a live-action version of this caveman/dinosaur world.

And oh boy, do they fully commit to this premise. All of the cars, houses, and decorations adhere to the super-chunky rock-and-log aesthetic, the prehistoric puns abound, and the goofy ways that the locals enslave animals for extremely specific purposes. I can imagine people spending hundreds of man-hours sketching out all of these places — places that would’ve been made with shoddy, quick CGI today.

The more I watched this, the more I concluded that this would have been a far better theme park than a movie.

I was also thinking that because The Flintstones is the bad kind of family movie. In my view, there are two types of family movies. The good kind are the ones where there’s something interesting and entertaining for all age ranges — those are hard to do but wonderful when discovered. The bad kind slap the “family” label on them but are strictly made for eight-year-olds and younger, and even those aren’t usually liked by kids.

That’s what this is. If it’s not being some hyperactive, slapsticky exercise in cartoon pantomime, it’s chucking stale jokes at the audience that were dated back in the stone age. Then every so often, we’re reminded that Rosie O’Donnell exists and Dino changes from a cool animatronic to awful mid-90s CGI depending on the scene. Allegedly, it took 32 writers to come up with these 90 minutes of bland storytelling, and that’s embarrassing to all involved.

I’d almost advocate watching The Flintstones completely with the sound off. You’re not going to miss much in the dialogue department, and that way you wouldn’t be distracted from the amazing sets and props.

Intermission!

• “Steven Spielrock Presents”
• Working in a rock quarry looks like a gulag
• Big points for recreating the iconic opening
• Tar Wars as a drive-in movie
• The “Univershell” logo being Pangea
• “Welcome to Bedrock: First with Fire”
• Fred’s got a sundial on his wrist as a watch
• The Vasquez Rocks as a primary backdrop
• “Maybe he’d calm down if we got him fixed!”
• The “garbage disposal”
• “Precious, they’d be better off with the monkey.”
• The prehistoric RocDonalds — you can bet there were tie-ins at the fast food chain in 1994
• The bowling alley is so wonderfully detailed
• How do you drink that giant beer when it goes down a foot?
• Chiseling everything looks like it would take forever
• The cartoon version of Fred in the newspaper
• That alarm clock would hurt
• “Sharon Stone” as a name is too on-the-nose for the ’90s
• Of course they’d play “Walk the Dinosaur” at the party
• OK, I chuckled at the “Jurassic Park” park
• “Steam? He’s a madman!”
• Pterodactyl poop joke
• “You hate my bird guts and I think you’re dumber than mud.”
• The B-52s!
• The leg lamp