Of course your children love them — they're three apples high, cuddly blue, and named after their defining traits such as Baker, Jokey or Serious. The Smurfs captured the imagination of little kiddie hearts via TV series and stuffed toys for several good reasons. However, their screen debut might force you to utter an expletive borrowed from the movie: “What the Smurf?”
For those uninitiated in Smurf-lingo, the blue ones use ‘smurf' to stand in for all manner of words — nouns, verbs, adjectives — as in “We're up the smurfing creek without a paddle”.
Director Raja Gosnell's 3D semi-animated film centres on the adventures of a band of cutesy Smurfs — and one lone Smurfette (voiced by Katy Perry) — in the Big Apple, where they are befriended by a sweet young New York couple, Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris) and Grace (Jayma Mays). Plot machinations to engineer this scenario include the wicked wizard Gargamel (Hank Azaria) and his foul cat; a wormhole between worlds that's opened up by a blue moon; and the aptly named Smurf, Clumsy (voiced by Anton Yelchin).
The Smurfs is a pastiche of so many kinds of movies, it's not surprising to see four script credits — J. David Stern, David N. Weiss, Jay Scherick and David Ronn. It's like a celluloid version of the game ‘exquisite corpse', where multiple people work on the same drawing without seeing what the others have drawn.
So, one part of Smurfs-the-movie recreates the innocent magic of the original lot who sing, dance and lead playful lives. Another segment is the misguided attempt at adding edge to the sweetness, via off-colour humour that includes — but isn't limited to — cat vomit and a grown man relieving himself in a wine bucket in a restaurant.
Yet another theme is the make-believe world of make-up, and Patrick's anxieties about getting the right ad for his weird boss' cosmetics. This presumably is for the grown-up sections of the audience, who are also fed ‘ cool' lines such as: “You know who I don't miss? Passive Aggressive Smurf!”
Then there are the oddly unexciting action sequences, the Gothic alchemist bits where Azaria continues to chew the scenery, and — the filmmakers not wanting to miss any opportunities — an interlude where wise Papa Smurf (voiced by Jonathan Winters) advises soon-to-be-papa Patrick about the joys of family life.
On the positive side, some of the ingredients flung haphazardly into this blue stew are fun — for example, the Smurf-search for a secret spell leading to a comic book by Belgian artist Peyo Culliford, who originally created the blue creatures in the 1950s; or the Smurfs blending into the ‘blue elements' of the Big Apple landscape, such as the Blue Man Group posters.
Having griped about The Smurfs being flat, uninspired and inconsistent — and it is —I'd nevertheless have to add that it would probably appeal to kids who love the blue brigade. They could get a real thrill out of seeing the big-screen version of the Smurfs, running amuck in a slickly rendered, bubblegum pop smurfiverse. Just be warned that as the accompanying grown-up you'd be muttering, ‘Gimme a Smurfing break', quite a lot.
The Smurfs
Genre: Kids and family
Director: Raja Grosnell
Cast: Neil Patrick Harris, Jayma Mays, Hank Azaria; voices of Kate Perry, Jonathan Winters
Storyline: The New York Blues, aka, the adventures of a bunch of Smurfs who unwittingly get stranded in New York City
Bottomline: A mishmash of a film that yet might please the kiddies
