We’re nearing the home stretch for kiddie summer movies, moms and dads. Stay hydrated and nourished, because your multiplex chaperone duties aren’t truly over until early August or so, when the fare turns distinctively adult-themed before going full prestige in the child-unfriendly zone of fall awards season.
But with the messy, strained “Smurfs” on offer this weekend, a tired parent may want to bail early and find a last-minute sleepaway camp to shove the little ones off to instead, because this latest big-screen version of the cute-culture behemoth may test your tolerance for all things wee and cerulean. As legacy management goes, it’s more trial than celebration.
Even if you grew up with Belgian artist Peyo’s utopian woodland humanoids (rendered with Hanna-Barbera efficiency for cheap ’80s television), nostalgia isn’t on offer here — just the usual running tap of attention-driven wackiness, creating a fast-growing puddle of gags, colors, songs (including pop icon Rihanna’s contributions) and believe-in-yourself platitudes that feel random, not earned. As deployed by “Shrek” franchise veteran Chris Miller (“Puss in Boots”), animation is less a storied artistic method with which to enchant, so much as a whiz-bang weapon of mass distraction, scalable and noisy.
The Smurfs themselves have come in for something of an origin makeover. No longer simple, communal mushroom-village inhabitants with happy lives centered on personality quirks and avoiding a mean wizard, in this telling (written by Pam Brady) they hail from a line of ancient, cosmic guardians of goodness, a background that feels beholden to the superhero mindset overriding so much popcorn gruel these days. Conversely, the baddies, wizard brothers Gargamel and new antagonist Razamel (both amusingly snarled into existence by voice actor JP Karliak, channeling Harvey Korman), belong to — what else? — an Evil Alliance set on world domination.
Everything about the story, from opening to closing dance party, feels like it was made up on an especially unimaginative playdate by bored kids who’d rather be watching TV. A Smurf called No Name (James Corden) wants to be known for something, like his trait-defined pals Hefty, Vanity, Grouchy, Baker and Clumsy. Close friend Smurfette (Rihanna), the village’s confident, outgoing badass, tries to buck him up, but he sings a boring who-am-I lament anyway.
Papa Smurf (John Goodman) is kidnapped through a portal, the first of many. There’s a missing magical book given the name Jaunty (Amy Sedaris). The Smurf rescue party goes to a disco in Paris. Then the Australian Outback. Outer space too. Natasha Lyonne voices the leader of an underground species of what look like scratchy couch pillows. Razamel hates Gargamel. Papa has a red-bearded brother, Ken (Nick Offerman tiringly doing Nick Offerman), and we learn later, a long-lost sibling named Ron (Kurt Russell). All these brothers, yet I still wouldn’t say family dynamics are a going emotional concern.
Sometimes everyone floats in the air. Mostly, it’ll be your mind. But turn away for one second, and the characters will have likely gone to another dimension. Because, of course, multiverses are really popular now too. Like the kind in which no voice cast member was likely in the same city as any other when they phoned in their lines.
At least the animators looked like they stayed busy. At one point, when dimension-palooza hurtles our tiny blue posse into different animation modes — claymation, pencil drawings, 8-bit video graphics — there’s a whiff of the delightful, meta-zany chaos of classic cartoons. But for the most part, “Smurfs” hews to the textbook silliness of CGI-generated action and attitude humor, only this time so needlessly zigging and zagging it barely has time to convincingly sell its ultimate message of strength in togetherness. An incoherent movie is hardly the vessel for that kind of lesson. When it ends, though, it’ll definitely feel like an example of kindness.
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