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The Flintstones is a big, shiny package of comic nostalgia, as much a theme park as a movie.

The greatest lost opportunity in The Flintstones is that its writers (more than 30) are so faithful to the 60's television series that they failed to add enough updated pop-culture references. The few included are among the film's best jokes.

This is a great-looking movie, a triumph of set design and special effects, creating a fantasy world halfway between suburbia and a prehistoric cartoon.

The quality of the writing is more than a notch below that of our show. Most of the jokes aren't as witty, and the laughs come less frequently. Maybe it's because so many of the things they do in the movie are lifted directly from the show, but a lot of stuff seems stale.

They're admirable attempts to update the old cartoon's broad social satire and add some depth to these characters, but they're played too gravely (gravelly?) to work in this wild world, and they don't prompt the same silly satisfaction that the show did.

Sadly the plot leaves a lot to be desired with major flaws never far away. The in-jokes are amusing but their novelty soon begins to wear thin.

The cast looks sound enough—John Goodman as Fred Flintstone, Elizabeth Perkins as Wilma, Rick Moranis and Rosie O'Donnell as the Rubbles—but the script, cobbled together by a crowd of writers, gives them nothing but a handful of limp gags.

Leadenly directed and almost soberly scripted, it never captures the campy brightness of the original series -- the herky-jerky animation, the wacky sound effects, the distinctive character voices and that cheesy laugh track.

The "stone"-shtick gets mighty old after about 15 minutes. More than 30 screenwriters worked on the Flintstones script, and the result just proves the ancient saying about too many cooks.

Considering the 32 writers (including Tom S. Parker, Jim Jennewein, and Steven E. de Souza) who worked on this live-action adaptation of the 60s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series about a Stone Age family, one might have expected a few funny lines here and there, but this is mirthless (and worthless) from top to bottom.