Movie Review: ‘The Smurfs’

Little blue CGI-powered, troll-like creatures escape their magical mushroom world through a time-space dimensional portal accidentally opened in a waterfall, which leads them to New York City while being chased by a hygienically incompetent wizard and his cat. While certainly imaginative, this plot for The Smurfs really isn’t as interesting as it sounds.

What unravels is a fantastical mixture of beloved classic children’s television with Hollywood’s heartless and misled ambitions for picking clean every bastion of youth entertainment by reintegrating it into a modern, live-action platform designed to encourage the development of new child fan bases as well as nostalgic embraces from adult audiences.

As another day unfolds in the Smurfs’ peaceful mushroom village and the vast majority of the gleeful, singing blue Smurfs prepare for the Blue Moon festival, Smurf Clumsy (voiced by Anton Yelchin), aptly named, wanders into a forbidden grotto where he is discovered by the evil wizard Gargamel (Hank Azaria) and chased back to the village.

Gargamel, with his cat Azrael, proceed to wreak havoc on the village, destroying mushroom homes and chasing out all of the Smurfs. A small group of Smurfs, Papa Smurf (voiced by Jonathan Winters), Smurfette (voiced by Katy Perry), Gutsy (voiced by Alan Cumming), and Grouchy (voiced by George Lopez) become separated as they attempt to chase down Clumsy, who has run into an unexplained random cave that ends at the edge of a cliff with a waterfall.

Soon, apparently because of the rising of the Blue Moon, a magical portal is opened in the waterfall, which sucks in the Smurfs. The other side of the portal yields a modern New York City Central Park. When the Smurfs realize that Gargamel has followed them to this new world, they flee into the hands and home of advertisement designer Patrick Winslow (Neil Patrick Harris) and his pregnant wife, Grace (Jayma Mays).

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From this point on, the movie then follows a dull and wholly unoriginal plot detailing the efforts of the Smurfs to return home. In the course of helping the Smurfs accomplish this end, Patrick inadvertently impresses his boss and learns to become tolerant of little, absurdly bothersome creatures that require almost constant attention.

Almost every aspect of the film is too childish for an adult viewer to find any semblance of entertainment, and the movie attempts too hard to follow the silly Hollywood trend of late to maturate children’s humor without actually attempting to include any maturity in the content.

This is shown by the numerous instances of blatant sexual innuendo in scenes throughout the movie, including one where Smurfette in a white dress re-enacts the famous Marilyn Monroe manhole shoot, and in dialogue like “smurf me” where the impossibly versatile word “smurf” replaces a whole slew of expletives.

For the sake of painting a clearer picture, other examples of this include lines like “son of a smurf,” “where the smurf are we?” and “up smurf creek without a smurfing paddle.”

The performances given by Harris and Mays are OK, but it’s hard to watch them spew out such inane lines in what would normally be very serious roles without feeling a sense of embarrassment for the two seasoned actors. Hank Azaria’s notable performance does provide a few sparse moments of genuine comedic relief, but they are too few to make any significant difference.

The Smurfs gives only what is absolutely necessary to drive its plot along and, while a few moments in the film will garner a smile or two, it is not very funny.

Director Raja Gosnell’s (Scooby Doo, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, and Big Momma’s House) attempt to drive the narrative of the little blue Smurfs back into the mainstream thus delivers neither content that viewers above the age of 8 will enjoy nor content that parents will find acceptable for their children under 8 to view, and certainly does not do justice to the classic cartoon series of the 1980s.

[etRating value=“ 2”]