No One Involved in ‘Smurfs’ Has Any Idea What They’re Doing

Sorry, Rihanna — this movie is a mess.
Photo: Paramount Animation

See it as a sign we’re out of ideas or just a symptom of the IP people are working with these days, but we’ve been relying on visits to the real world to give an added dimension to properties that on their own would feel thin. Less than a decade after Will Ferrell played the control-freak dad fueling the drama in The LEGO Movie, he was the Mattel CEO trying to recapture the dolls-gone-rogue in Barbie. On Broadway, the just-closed Boop! The Musical tried the same trick as the Greta Gerwig movie, releasing its 1930s cartoon character into present-day New York for a journey of self-discovery. And now we have Smurfs, an animated sorta-musical reboot of the Peyo property, which yanks its cerulean humanoids from their mushroom village in the woods and drops them into the real world. You would think this would provide some opportunities for regular people to reckon with the existence of blue gnomes in slouchy cone hats — but regular people don’t notice the Smurfs, even when they’re scurrying across the bar at a Parisian discotheque.

The Smurfs go to the real world for the same reason they do everything else in the movie, which at different points invokes the multiverse, serves up bewildering lore, and includes a pillar-of-light showdown out of a superhero movie — because no one involved in it has any idea what they’re doing. Here’s the real squandered opportunity: Never once in Smurfs’s excursions into Parisian nightlife and an autobahn-adjacent park does anyone acknowledge whether Rihanna exists in the universe of the film. Rihanna, who’s also a producer, doesn’t perform the voice of Smurfette so much as she treats the lone lady Smurf like an extension of her pop-star persona. If Smurfs feels like it’s desperately searching for a way to justify its own existence, it’s confident on one front: It’s a random but undeniable vehicle for the first new Rihanna song in three years. And actually, despite making me feel unwell, the musical numbers — which include a villagewide dance overseen by a record-spinning Papa Smurf (John Goodman) and an inspirational interlude that finds Smurfette bouncing in the pocket of a kangaroo — are where Smurfs is most secure in itself. It’s when the music stops and the movie is forced to contend with the mishmash of recycled elements it’s trying to use as a plot that it really flounders.

It doesn’t seem like it should be quite so hard to make a children’s movie, especially one that has as much material to draw from as Smurfs, which is based on the much-adapted franchise created by the Belgian comic-book writer Peyo in 1958. But Smurfs, which was directed by animation veteran Chris Miller and written by Pam Brady, doesn’t appear to care for the Smurfs all that much — or at least it tries to graft the characters onto a world-saving action adventure. It gives the Smurfs a backstory as magical guardians of good who’ve been tasked with protecting a sentient book named Jaunty Grimoire, voiced by Amy Sedaris, who is so clearly just Towelie from South Park (Brady is a longtime Trey Parker and Matt Stone collaborator) that its very presence is a fuck-you to the audience. It relegates traditional Smurfs antagonist Gargamel to a secondary role in favor of focusing on his fellow-evil-wizard brother Razamel (both are voiced by JP Karliak). And it introduces No Name Smurf, whose deal is that he hasn’t figured out his Smurfly role yet — though let’s be honest, with his being voiced by James Corden, he would obviously just be British Smurf. When No Name obtains some magic powers, despite the movie insisting that Smurfs can’t do magic, it summons the attention of Razamel and his underling Joel (Dan Levy), who immediately summon a portal over the village to kidnap Papa Smurf, who, of course, must be rescued.

A lot of questions are raised in this process: Why did Papa Smurf opt not to tell all the other Smurfs in the village about the incredibly important magical book that’s been hiding among them all this time? Why is Papa Smurf called Papa when his russet-bearded brother (Nick Offerman), whom the other Smurfs are told to seek out, is just named Ken? And if regular naming conventions are a possibility, then why is No Name so pressed? Are the Snooterpoots, a desert-dwelling community of puffball-looking creatures ruled over by Mama Poot (Natasha Lyonne) as callous a merchandising gambit as they appear? Why are humans Razamel and Joel animated, despite existing in the real world, and what is the difference between regular humans and animated ones? We may never know the answers, just as we may never learn whether, as the press notes claim, Rihanna really is a bottomless well of Smurfs knowledge (“I think she loves music too,” she says of Smurfette, “and her favorite genres are hip-hop, reggae, Afrobeats, ballads, and house”). But Smurfs, which otherwise animates its characters with a deliberate simplicity that makes them look like 3-D printed figurines based on Peyo’s illustrations, does have one memorable sequence.

It’s a chase through a doorway that plunges the characters through different environments — Claymation, side-scrolling 8-bit video game, microscopic, and anime — and for a moment the movie’s frantic attempts to throw everything at the wall have a joyful visual payoff. Then it’s over, and Smurfs rushes toward a finale so generic it could have been lifted from a variety of blockbusters over recent years. Say what you will about relying on the real world to comment on your own ridiculous IP, but at least it requires a certain amount of self-awareness. For Smurfs to attempt that sort of cleverness, it would have to come up with something, anything, to say.