Smurfs

In preparing to review this film, I committed a classic filmgoer fumble when looking up the creative team. Spying someone named Chris Miller as director, I jumped at the prospect of half of the directing team of the Spider-Verse and Jump Street movies being brought in to helm a franchise that was tired after only two, fairly recent films. I can therefore only blame myself for the disappointment of learning that this Chris Miller was not the one associated with Phil Lord, but instead the director of Shrek the Third and Puss in Boots, two projects remembered as being the lesser entries of their franchises.

Smurfs is far from a disaster, but it’s still a pity to see mainstream children’s films made in a way that clearly looks down on their audience. It’s not afraid to go for the low-brow and cheap gags rather than trying to elevate their story telling to the lofty heights children’s imaginations so often reach. In this not-quite-but-sort-of remake, the Smurfs live humbly in their village, enjoying their many and varied abilities and personalities. All of them that is, except No Name Smurf (James Corden), who doesn’t appear to have anything special about him. When the evil wizard Razamel (brother to Gargamel, the Smurfs’ nemesis) kidnaps Papa Smurf, No Name and the other Smurfs will have to venture into the human world on an epic quest to find him.

Whilst the film stays away from the toilet humour that has blighted so much mainstream children’s animation, the jokes still leave much to be desired. Perhaps it stems from the lack of real connected characters, and the sense that the action taking place in the ‘real world’ is completely unmoored from consequence. The Smurfs constantly discuss their needing to remain unseen, but then stumble blindly through a Parisian nightclub, so out in the open that you begin to wonder if you misheard or imagined those earlier stakes.

The filmmaking itself looks deeply weird, with the photorealistic animation of the ‘real world’ buffering up harshly against the rounded, highly expressive nature of the Smurfs themselves. Action will take place in a bland void of flat animation, before the Smurfs move quickly through superfluous photorealism to get to the next area where it feels safely devoid of features to let things happen again.

The voice cast themselves do little to engage your interest, often delivering lines in a flat, mannerless tone. Mind you, anyone can be forgiven for not giving their utmost when asked to repeatedly deliver the joke of replacing famous (or is it cliche at this point) lines with the title dropped in (for instance, putting ‘You can’t handle the truth’ through this process would creatively replace it with ‘You can’t Smurf the Smurf.’)

Ultimately, this isn’t the worst children’s film of recent years, but unless you are desperately looking for something new to entertain the young ones with, maybe skip this entry for now.