We deserve better. Our children deserve better.
Yes, the abundance of kids at the preview screening of The Smurfs seemed to be laughing loud and often. But we wouldn’t trust children to do their own grocery shopping or design their own school curriculum. Why then should we trust their taste in movies?
In what should be considered the golden age for quality family entertainment (which might also rightly be called the Age of Pixar), 90 minutes of lame slapstick, canned sappy sentiment, and “hip” pop culture references just shouldn’t be considered good enough. Families deserve better.
I watched a lot of Smurfs cartoons as a child. The show was never my favorite Saturday morning fare, but I sat through many tales of tiny blue creatures, each named for his or her own dominant personality trait and relentlessly hunted by the evil sorcerer Gargamel. Every episode seemed to revolve around either 1) Papa Smurf heading to a distant mountain to find an obscure root he needed for an incantation, or 2) The dam near their village threatening to break. Perhaps there were a few other stock plots. Regardless, it was not a richly developed universe for story-telling.
Which explains why this movie removes a few of the Smurfs to our world (specifically New York City) as quickly as possible. They end up enlisting the help of marketing executive Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris) and his wife Grace (Jayma Mays) to return to their world before the evil Gargamel (Hank Azaria) captures them.
Most of the comedy is physical, with Gargamel and the Smurfs being thrown and smashed about the city. It was these moments that led many of the younger members of the preview audience to fall into hysterics. I found the action too forced. Slapstick humor relies on a certain amount of shock and playful surprise to succeed, and too many of the Smurfs’ gags were too clearly telegraphed.
Then there are the attempts at bringing the movie a level of self-awareness, so as to seem oh-so-hip and “meta.” In the “real world” of the movie, Smurfs exist as fictional creatures invented by a Belgian cartoonist, just as in our own real world. Papa Smurf (voiced by Jonathan Winters) is able to find a way home after consulting a book featuring the original Smurfs comic strips. There were a few lines of dialogue that went right over the heads of the children and made me laugh, but most of the movie’s attempts to please adults result in lame moments like when Smurfette, voiced by pop star Katy Perry, coyly says “I kissed a Smurf, and I liked it.” (Oddly echoing the title of Perry’s first hit song.)
The movie’s device of transporting its characters from a magical land into the hard-boiled modern world led me to repeatedly think of Disney’s superior Enchanted. That film neatly worked the trick of both embracing and laughing at its fairy-tale roots — which made it truly entertaining for the entire family. Come to think of it: just go rent Enchanted.
Sure, your kids might be dying to see The Smurfs instead. But they’re probably also dying to eat Count Chocula for breakfast, and are you going to feed them that?
