Grade: B-

Verdict: It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a . . . squirrel?

Details: Starring Robert De Niro, Rene Russo, Jason Alexander. Rated PG for brief mild language. 1 hour, 32 minutes.

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Review: The wisecracks, wordplay and terrible, terrible puns jump from the small screen to the big one in "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle." The live-action and animated comedy drags the heroic squirrel and moose into the 21st century, and into three dimensions.

Their flesh-and-blood co-stars include, of all people, Robert De Niro wearing a big facial scar and an oil-slick hairpiece as Fearless Leader. (De Niro is also one of the producers.)

He's not the only high-end collaborator. Director Des McAnuff is a two-time Tony winner for his Broadway work, the script is by admired New York playwright Kenneth Lonergan and the movie boasts cameos from Billy Crystal, Carl Reiner, Whoopi Goldberg, John Goodman and three different turns by Jonathan Winters.

But as lively and well-crafted as the movie is, it never answers the burning question: why?

"R&B" gets off to a dandy sardonic start as the Narrator (Keith Scott, who also voices Bullwinkle) recaps the history of the TV show, canceled in 1964, and presents us with the woeful decline since then of the cartoon characters' home base, Frostbite Falls. "All this exposition is wearing me out," Bullwinkle complains, one of the many cracks that give the movie its loopy, self-aware charm.

At its best, "R&B" mocks its own existence. The Narrator continues to hold forth, showing us how Eastern European badniks Boris and Natasha are, via expensive special effects, "converted into even more expensive motion picture stars."

Namely, Jason Alexander with a mustache like two opposing pencil tips, and Rene Russo vacuum-packed in a series of darkly glamorous dresses. Then, of course, there's De Niro, whose Fearless Leader plots to take over the human world through his network, RBTV (Really Bad Television), his broadcasts turning couch potatoes into zombies who will vote him into the White House.

So it's up to rookie FBI agent Karen Sympathy (Piper Perabo) to bring the squirrel and the bull from rerun-land, into our own world. "I think we're on the wrong show," Bullwinkle marvels at his first sight of Karen: "Look how well they drew that girl!"

True enough, Perabo is lovely, looking like a blond fusion of Natalie Portman and Hilary Swank. But in this, only her second movie, she lacks the wit and timing to hold her own against her computer-generated co-stars. Which means that the threesome's long road trip from Hollywood to New York can seem long indeed.

The movie front-loads its clever bits, and its second half offers diminishing returns. It keeps you awake with its throwaway sight gags, retro tone recalling "Austin Powers" and its pop culture japes. (Personally I could have done without an awkward-looking De Niro sending up his own "You talkin' to me" riff from "Taxi Driver."). And its ludicrous but literate humor might teach kids that comedy can be more than just gross-out jokes.

But the movie never quite coheres into a consistent vision: hipster salute for a beloved old shoe, or newly minted kiddie flick? Like Rocky and Bullwinkle stranded in the 3-D world, it's a little lost, stuck somewhere between nostalgic baby boomers and the Pokémon crowd.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service