Starring Brendan Fraser, Leslie Mann, Thomas Haden Church and the voice of John Cleese Directed by Sam Weisman Rated PG, with mild profanity and bodily-function humor Running time 90 minutes We give this film a rating of 5 out of 10

(July 16, 1997) -- Movie special effects have become so sophisticated that they barely rank as an attraction for moviegoers anymore.

Sure, crowds flocked to Lost World -- but they did it because they hoped Steven Spielberg could somehow scare them as much as he did in Jurassic Park, not to see the latest advances in computer-generated imagery. Yes, they're rushing to Men in Black but because it's funny and exciting, not because of the explosions and morphs.

Just because you have the technology, however, doesn't mean you know how to make the movie, as George of the Jungle shows. Like The Flintstones, George of the Jungle uses computer effects to reinterpret a TV cartoon as a live-action film, while retaining the reality-bending capability of animation. Like The Flintstones, George of the Jungle works so hard at making reality into a cartoon that it forgets to make the cartoon into an actual movie.

Based on the short-lived TV cartoon series by Jay Ward (creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle), George was a Tarzan spoof in which George, king of the jungle, was also incredibly clumsy and not particularly bright. The brains of the outfit was a talking gorilla named Ape, who inevitably got George out of scrapes.

For this live-action version, writers Dana Olsen (Encino Man) and Audrey Wells (The Truth About Cats and Dogs) make George (Brendan Fraser) smart but naive, a jungle savant who still relates to life the way a gorilla would. But their idea of humor is to rely on jokes about gorilla flatulence and elephant dung (into which a villain makes a kid-pleasing, face-first pratfall), while missing the potential of the material itself.

A take-off on Tarzan, George focuses on a youngster lost in a jungle plane crash who is raised by the animals of the jungle and becomes their king. Despite his dazzlingly defined pecs, however, George has a tendency to smash into trees while swinging on vines and, occasionally, to fall out of his treehouse.

He rescues heiress Ursula Stanhope (Leslie Mann), who is on safari studying the great apes, from a lion that has attacked her -- and from her cowardly but rich fiancee Lyle (Thomas Haden Church). George takes her back to his treehouse, where he and Ursula get to know each other, while Lyle and his safari assistants search for her.

George eventually goes back to San Francisco with Ursula, where he runs afoul of her dragon of a mother (Holland Taylor). Even as he tries to decide the right thing to do, he gets an urgent message: Ape, his trusty companion back in Africa, has been kidnapped by hunters, who figure to make a fortune in Vegas with the talking primate.

Unsurprisingly, the funniest character here is Ape, voiced by John Cleese. As written, he's the simian equivalent of the John Gielgud character in Arthur. Unfortunately, Ape gets distinctly less screentime than he deserves.

Which leaves way too much of it for Fraser, Mann and Church to try to interpret Olsen and Wells' idea of what's really funny. For good measure, there are a couple of buffoonish henchmen (Greg Cruttwell and Abraham Benrubi), who are even less skilled as physical comedians than the writers are as verbal ones.

The special effects (such as a computer-generated elephant who is as frisky and rambunctious as an Irish setter) give the movie a rubbery visual look that makes it cartoony without calling attention to itself.

But the imagination invested in the visual effects for George of the Jungle does call attention to how little thought went into the rest of it.