Yabba Dabba Dud By Michael O'Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 28, 2000

Fred, Wilma, Betty and Barney are back in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas." (Universal and Amblin)

Yet, ironically, he's one of the best things about "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas," a sluggish, joyless prequel to the 1994 live-action cartoon that attempts to relate how Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble met their future wives, Wilma Slaghoople and Betty O'Shale. Playing a proto-hominid with a room-temperature IQ, Baldwin is at least well-cast as Barney, which is more than can be said for his co-stars.

As Fred, Brit Mark Addy, the doughy loser in "The Full Monty," does his best to bring some weight – no pun intended – to the role, but all of the character's trademark mannerisms ("Yabba dabba doo," his tippy-toe bowling stance, his ability to empty a swimming pool with a single cannonball off the diving board) ring as false as the papier-ma^che» set. Kristen Johnson, so wonderfully Amazonian on "Third Rock From the Sun," is just plain too big, too busty and too whiskey-voiced as Wilma, and Jane Krakowski looks more like a Stone Age Betty Boop than the future Betty Rubble with her overly-mascaraed saucer eyes and the same cheap tramp routine she has perfected on "Ally McBeal."

Despite one or two other worthy performances (local-boy-made-good Jason Kravitz as a fey Vegas choreographer and the Pee Wee Herman-esque Alan Cumming playing both the alien Gazoo and rock star Mick Jagged), as well as a couple of clever prehistoric gadgets (a tiny pterodactyl flies out of the remote control to shut off the TV), there's little to like here. Even the grand camp of Harvey Korman and Joan Collins playing Wilma's parents gets swallowed up in this tar pit of a movie, whose so-called sense of humor lumbers around like a dying mastodon instead of flitting from joke to joke like a velociraptor, as it should.

Is it too much to hope that this comedically exhausted franchise may one day become extinct?

THE FLINTSTONES IN VIVA ROCK VEGAS (PG, 91 minutes) – Contains sophomoric sexual innuendo and flatulent-dinosaur humor.