Now Showing: The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas • U-571

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Candid Reviews of Movies Just Hitting The Big Screen

by Cole Smithey

The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas

I know you’re thinking: a live-action Flintstones sequel –— it’s got to suck with a capital S. And that’s just what I thought going into a kiddie-filled Saturday morning screening of "The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas." I loathed the 1994 movie The Flintstones, based on the 1960s animated television series, primarily because the casting was atrocious, and the comedy didn’t ring. However Viva Rock Vegas proves that sequels can prevail. Casting is everything, and great music makes a huge difference. Between an earful of cool Nick Lowe songs (including "Seven Nights to Rock") and impeccable casting of actors who flesh out the original Flintstones cartoon characters with an infectious flair, is a surprisingly sweet and entertaining movie that fulfills its ultra colorful perimeters of splashy humor with loving authority.

Director Barry Levant returns from the first Flintstones movie to direct this prequel-fashioned story showing the origins of Fred Flintstone (Mark Addy - The Full Monty), Wilma Slaghoople (Kristen Johnson - 3rd Rock From The Sun), Barney Rubble (Stephen Baldwin - The Usual Suspects), and Betty (Jane Krakowski - Ally McBeal).Poor little rich girl, Wilma, deserts her cloistered moneyed existence and tyrannical mother, Pearl (Joan Collins - Dynasty), to find sincere friendship, in the guise of Betty, and honest love with Fred. Wilma’s dark horse is playboy Chip Rockefeller (Thomas Gibson - Eyes Wide Shut). Chip has designs on Wilma and her money, and isn’t about to be outdone by a rock quarry crane operator like Fred. When Chip invites the gang to be guests at his casino in Rock Vegas, everyone’s truer nature is revealed.

Mating rituals are what’s at stake, and Fred, Barney, Wilma, and Betty are on a fast track to love and marriage with The Great Gazoo (Alan Cumming - Eyes Wide Shut) as an avid witness. Fred and Wilma even practically give simultaneous birth to "Dino," when the puppy-like dinosaur springs from a egg while the new lovers ride on a roller coaster. There are subtle yet over-the-top dashes of adult humor to keep adults laughing right along with their tikes. As when the lovably dim Barney tries to remove spilt whipped cream from the chest of Chip’s bodacious girlfriend. Betty witnesses this activity from behind the girl and naturally assumes the worst before being temporarily swept off her feet by a visiting rock star.

Each actor’s performance unfolds like a treasure trove of physical comedy. Stephen Baldwin trots out an unexpectedly goofy and self-deprecating image as Fred’s loyal buddy, Barney. The addition of Alan Cumming as little green buzzing alien, The Great Gazoo, builds in a self-mocking mechanism to the amusement. Cummings tosses the movie an unexpected curve with his secondary performance as lip curling singer "Mick Jagged" of the "The Stones." But the biggest kick comes from Jane Krakowski’s sassy performance as the vivacious and good-hearted Betty. Krakowski winks and charms her way into the heart of the story like a cross between Barbara Eden (ala I Dream of Genie) and Liza Minnelli (from Cabaret - 1972). The spunky Broadway actress embodies an iconic cuteness that’s as sweet as ice cream.

The Flintstones Viva Rock Vegas takes cues from the way movies like John Waters’ Cry Baby succeeds and Star Wars Episode 1 The Phantom Menace fails. In Cry Baby, Waters built on top of 1950s American iconography to have his characters inhabit a color saturated world of West Side Story meets Elvis meets "freaky." "The Phantom Menace" failed because nothing "met." There was never any narrative coherence. None of the actors (except for Natalie Portman) was inhabiting much of anything. The incongruity between the poorly written computer-generated characters and the actors was constantly at odds. Director Levant and his team of cast and crew never attempt to reinvent the wheel. They merely tweak the comedy already built into the original cartoon’s loyal characters with complete abandon. The Flintstones’ main characters are significant because they are predominantly concerned with loyalty to each other. It’s that kind of love bug that has bitten this fresh installment on a Generation X cartoon favorite. Yabba Dabba Dooooo.

U-571

No one can blame writer/director Jonathan Mostow (Breakdown) for wanting to make a World War II movie set in the belly of a creaking Nazi sub piloted by Americans trying to escape with a code-making machine while being pummeled with unrelenting depth charges. World War II submarines are intensely fascinating examples of military engineering which demanded a very special breed of men to helm them through commonly fatal maneuvers. Mostow, however, sinks in the Atlantic’s lower depths by grafting too much fiction over history in his hollow quest for a dramatic storyline. Of the thousands of truly sensational submarine stories from World War II, it’s a wonder why Mostow strayed so far from the beaten path to contrive a poorly constructed narrative.

Submarine based movies will forever and always be measured against Wolfgang Petersen’s remarkable 1981 film Das Boot (The Boat) for good reason. Petersen didn’t need to add an ounce of labored dramatic-hamburger-helper to his historically accurate depiction of strife and psychological torture suffered by a 43-man crew of Germans trying to escape their enemy in a badly damaged U-boat. It is, by far, the most claustrophobic cinematic experience available and carries with it a double climax that confirms its 150-minute length as essential to the story. The movie impales its audience in a sickly shallow breath of nauseated fear that World War II submariners constantly endured regardless of which side they were fighting on.

To say that Mostow got off on the wrong foot in writing and producing U-571 is a vast understatement. The director has taken a beating in the British press for having changed the sailors, upon which the story is based, from English to American. Forget that the German sub, in which the British seamen captured the first German Enigma code-machine in 1941, was abandoned by Nazis who jumped ship because they thought it was sinking. In Mostow’s version, our American heroes launch a complex plan in which they take over a U-boat from the Nazis for the expressed purpose of stealing the highly cryptic code machine before being stranded on the foreign vessel when their own sub is blown apart by enemy fire. All of this dramatic hanky panky percolates in off-beat rhythms that flash out to the audience in semaphore code — dramatic license in progress.

The principal elements that U-571 has going for it are its actors and its atmosphere. The movie is blatantly targeted to war aficionado guys, and to women beguiled by the likes of Matthew McConaghey (A Time To Kill), Jon Bon Jovi (No Looking Back), Harvey Keitel (Bad Lieutenant), and Bill Paxton (A Simple Plan). The men do a fine job of keeping stiff upper lips in the confines of an increasingly water logged sub, but can’t do much to compensate for jumps in the script that deplete the story’s suspense as quickly as it arrives. Mostow’s roughly scripted characters are drawn in cut-out stereotype templates that allow little room for the actors to express much beyond their mutual circumstance. Harvey Keitel, who served as a Marine in real life, brings an authentic tautness to his role of "Chief," mentor to the sub’s Captain played serviceably by McConaughey. Bill Paxton comes across as the cast’s most engaging character, but doesn’t get enough screen time to do the role justice.

U-571 is fine little matinee movie to kill a couple of hours if the only other movies on the marquee are Ready To Rumble, Skulls, and The Road To El Dorado. You won’t get in a fight with your date/husband/wife as you almost certainly will if you chose to see American Psycho. But U-571 is lacking the very authenticity that it sells itself on. At the end of the movie text captions reveal exact dates that other Enigma code-machines were captured from the Germans. Mostow has said that the whole code-machine story component was a perfect MacGuffin for him to base his script around — as the Maltese Falcon was merely a narrative prop for Humphrey Bogart to pursue. With that kind of foundation, I’ll take a movie that elevates rather than diminishes its source material, like Mary Harron’s American Psycho, any day.