Stream It Or Skip It?

Let’s be blunt: Smurfs (now streaming on Paramount+) is the stupidest shit you’ve tried avoiding at all costs since The Garfield Movie. It’s not because this movie is another chunk of content from a C-grade slab of intellectual property, but because it sells itself as a not-your-father’s version of a chunk of content from a C-grade slab of intellectual property. This, frankly, is the only way to make this franchise – about little blue-skinned annoying shrimplings who annoyingly say “Smurf” in place of various other words in their daily speech, be it noun, verb or other – even more annoying. And so something that began as a whimsical 1950s Belgian comic book and became widely popular via an innocuous American Saturday morning cartoon in the 1980s, is now an almost-musical starring pop singer Rihanna as the voice of Smurfette, with a plot incorporating MacGuffins and the multiverse that might function as a Marvel satire. Which is to say, we’re pretty far from the Smurf Village here, folks – and my initial feeling that that might be a good thing was swiftly squashed by the reality that it’s just a sad stab at being “hip” and “cool” and “funny.” 

SMURFS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with some exposition about four magic books that a group of evil wizards wants to acquire so they can rule the world. Sigh. One of the books is named Jaunty Grimoire. It has arms and legs and eyeballs and a brain and is voiced by Amy Sedaris. Sigh again. Jaunty is hidden in Smurf Village, where there’s currently a party goin’ on led by DJ Papa Smurf, a string of letters that finds me stopping with the sighing and starting with the upchucking (with apologies to John Goodman, an all-timer who deserves the easy paycheck for voicing the character). Smurfette (Rihanna), notably the only female Smurf in existence, leads the singing and dancing about how “everything goes with blue,” and how being a Smurf is great because every Smurf has a “thing.” And that “thing” is a name that describes each Smurf’s primary trait: Brainy Smurf, Grouchy Smurf, Sound Effects Smurf, Out of Focus Smurf, Way Back There Smurf, etc. Please laugh!

And now we meet No Name Smurf (James Corden). As the moniker implies, he’s an empty vessel. He has no “thing” and is very sad about it. I guess he could be Depressed Smurf, but that’s probably a bridge too far for a kiddie movie. One day, No Name decides to be Magic Smurf, but is reminded by Papa Smurf that Smurfs can’t do magic. Never. Ever. NEVER EVER. Of course, a couple scenes and several DOA jokes later, No Name out of the blue starts doing magic, which betrays the secret location of Smurf Village to the Smurfs’ forever antagonists, evil sibling wizards Razamel and Gargamel (both voiced by JP Karliak), who send a portal to steal away Papa Smurf to lawd knows where. The wizards intend to pry the location of Jaunty out of Papa Smurf so they can join other wizards who possess the other three books, and enshroud all of reality in darkness or whatever, etc. etc., and all that jazz. Notably, the wizards communicate via Zoom, and Razamel proves his raging incompetence by blathering on and on without realizing he’s muted. Please laugh.

At this point in the movie, if you haven’t trebuchet’d the living room furniture at the TV yet, you’ll learn that the Lesser Smurfs, led by Smurfette and No Name, embark on a quest to rescue their Papa. The adventure takes them to Paris and a random desert and the inside of a disco ball and to Hither and then to Yon – some of which might be parallel dimensions maybe? Can even Brainy Smurf make sense of this? – and involves finding Papa’s brothers, who are not called Uncle Smurf 1 and Uncle Smurf 2. No, they’re Ken (Nick Offerman) and Ron (Kurt Russell). Yep, just Ken and Ron. Not Big Daddy Smurf or I Only Know He Exists Because He Sends Me A Birthday Card With 20 Bucks In It Every Year Smurf. Ken. And Ron. The Lesser Smurf crew gets help from creatures called Snooterpoots (yep – PLEASE LAUGH), who look like the Fry Kids from ancient McDonald’s commercials if they were made out of 1970s shag-carpet remnants, and are led by Mama Poot (Natasha Lyonne). If all this seems like enough stuff for two movies, you’d be right, but if you’re getting the feeling it probably should’ve been the stuff of zero movies, you’d be more right.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If anyone out there expected a Smurfs movie to be an unholy amalgamation of Trolls and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I’d like them to pick some lottery numbers for me. Otherwise, there’s some Despicable Me dinking around to “enjoy,” and few IP reboots venture further from the original tone and premise than this and The Garfield Movie.

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: No sniffing at Lyonne and Sedaris for taking easy paydays, all right?

Memorable Dialogue: Somebody got paid to Smurf this Smurf:

Ken: You Smurfs don’t know Smurf about Smurf.

Smurfette: We all Smurf. I’ve probably Smurfed more than you’ll ever Smurf.

Ken: Sounds like a load of Smurf.

Smurfette: Stick a Smurf in it.

Ken: Smurf that!

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Smurfs tries its little ass off to reestablish Smurf relevance, but instead of embracing its own Smurfiness, it egregiously snatches its core ideas from other, more popular stuff. The film was originally conceived as The Smurfs Musical, but that idea seems to have been half-abandoned and tossed into an unappetizing gumbo with bits of superhero-movie plots (Ron is essentially the Smurf version of Thor), self-referential comedy and fantasy-adventure fodder. Perhaps the amorphous approach is right in line with the very nature of the word “Smurf,” which lacks true definition. To say the movie is little more than just a bunch of Smurfing around is hacky, but true.

My compulsive assertion is to just let Smurfs be Smurfs – and I don’t even like Smurfs. I don’t want to see Smurfs do anything, ever, but here, they do everything, and it’s all tryhard nonsense, rendered gratingly loud for no reason whatsoever. What should be a relatively simple story about No Name’s identity quest ironically lacks identity of its own, and comes off as an incomprehensible hodgepodge: Recurring jokes about French fries and clogmaking, Rihanna as Smurfette singing a song while riding in a kangaroo pouch, poo-poo humor (“I think I just Smurfed my pants”), etc., all couched within what can either be described as a “hybrid visual style” or “a Smurfing mess.” It veers from Spider-Verse-ish hyperdynamic visuals to a live-action/animation combo to photorealistic animation and all points in-between, as if numerous animation houses did the work without any cohesive vision guiding them. (Some will praise a third-act jaunt through a few different animation styles, including Claymation and crayon draw-rings, but it’s little more than a ripoff of the “abstract thought” bit from Inside Out with the cleverness extracted). 

Such desperation is rather unbecoming, even for a moribund franchise like the Smurfs. The subtext here is, you’re so desperate to entertain your children, we can just throw shit at the wall and you’ll look at it. At least the film isn’t actively immoral or offensive, and nobody in their right mind would ever declare the Smurfs as former trendsetters who are now chasing instead of leading – these highly smushable little blue things should be content to do their own dumb, irritating thing in their cobwebbed corner of the zeitgeist. Sure, it’s too easy to dog on the Smurfs. But everything else in life is hard, so: Smurfs royally sucks.

Our Call: Get in the spirit of the movie and be Turn Off The Damn TV Smurf. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.