I Checked Out The WWE Flintstones Movie

As a life long Flintstones fan, I’ve been waiting for a very long time for this movie to come out. The Scooby-Doo movie was actually pretty solid for a quick hour and a half sit through, but this is just fifty minutes long. I’m really not sure if this is going to work as well, but I’m going to give a list of thoughts/issues throughout the whole thing. Expect some rare Flintstones fan boy rage in this one. Let’s get to it.

So first and foremost, this thing’s full title is The Flintstones and WWE: Stone Age Smackdown. That’s quite the wordy title, and the movie is only 49 minutes long. At the end of the day though, that’s probably a good thing. This really isn’t very good and didn’t need to be made. There’s a really basic plot (Fred needs money, thinks sports entertainment (not wrestling. Unless I missed it, that word is never used) is an easy way to afford a vacation) and everything is wrapped up really fast. There are only two wrestling shows in the whole thing and less than five matches.

Of course the main thing here is the wrestlers, but there aren’t many to go around. The entire cast from WWE is:

John Cena: a relative of Mr. Slate (which means he’s actually related to Barney if this is cannon) who can throw around dinosaurs.

Rey Mysterio: a guy who works in an office and wears a mask for no apparent reason.

Undertaker: an undertaker, who messes with a tablet a lot.

Bella Twins: two girls from Bedrock. They’re in this about three minutes combined.

Daniel Bryan: just there for a YES cameo.

CM Punk: villain. More on him later.

Mark Henry: Punk’s lackey.

Vince McMahon: owns a raw fish bar. GET IT?

And that’s it. The wrestlers are pretty limited here, and it’s made even stranger by the fact that they’re not wrestlers. They’re just people Fred hires to be in his shows, meaning they don’t know how to wrestle a match. Undertaker and Cena use tombstones at one point but that’s the extent of the wrestling involved.

There isn’t much to the plot and I’ll spare the major spoilers in case you want to see this. There’s only a handful of decent jokes, such as Cena suggesting he take up music and Punk being obsessed with ice cream. The only other scenes that gave me a chuckle were Daniel Bryan and John Cena doing the Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck YES/NO bit (WWE meets Looney Tunes could have some serious potential) and Bam Bam being stronger than Henry.

The characters look really off for the most part, but at least it’s consistent. Wilma’s head is MASSIVE and it’s really distracting. As for the WWE people, Cena looked fine, Vince wasn’t wearing a suit and looks way out of place in anything else, Mark Henry looked homeless, and the Bellas look like they did back in 2008. On the other hand though, they pretty much nailed Undertaker’s look perfectly, save for him wearing pink trunks at one point and spending too much time on the tablet.

For the most part, the wrestlers are just kind of there. Cena does a few things (including having his theme song start playing for no apparent reason), Mysteiro could have been anyone, Henry is a standard lackey and the Bellas are run off by Wilma and Betty. The interesting character though is Punk, who has the only running joke (thinking Barney’s pet Hoparoo is a kangaroo. I didn’t say the joke was funny), bullies Barney and seems to be cruel to animals. I don’t think they were going over the top with him as he’s certainly the closest thing they have to a villain, but it was interesting given what’s happened since he left.

As for the Flintstones stuff, it’s pretty standard, uninspired stuff.  These characters could have been on any given cartoon and you wouldn’t notice the difference. Fred wants money, the girls don’t trust the boys because they know they’ll have a scheme, and that’s about the extent of their involvement. It feels like someone said “put the Flintstones in this” and someone who has watched all of two episodes of the show was in charge of them (to be fair though, you can pretty much understand the main Flintstones characters after watching five minutes of any episode). They’re there, but it’s nothing you haven’t seen before.

Overall, this really is just a thing. It’s not really funny, it’s not really good, and it’s basically just there to say WWE and the Flintstones are doing something together. The Scooby-Doo movie had WAY more effort put in and I had about a thousand times more fun watching it. This pretty much just came and went and only got a handful of chuckles out of me. It’s far from horrible as it’s not even 50 minutes long, but unless you’re a big Flintstones fan, there’s no need to watch it. The wrestlers aren’t enough of a factor to draw in WWE fans and you would be better off watching the Scooby-Doo movie instead.

Oh and one more thing: one of the main jokes in the history of the Flintstones is taking someone with a famous name and adding a rock pun. They’re doing a movie with WWE and no one brings up THE ROCK??? That’s the biggest layup joke you could ever make and there’s nothing there? Come on now.

Remember to follow me on Twitter @kbreviews and pick up my new book on the History of Saturday Night’s Main Event at Amazon for just $3.99 at:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SATPVKW

And check out my Amazon author page with wrestling books for under $4 at:

http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Hall/e/B00E6282W6

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