Having never consumed anything having to do with those amorphous animated blue creatures popular in the 1980s known as the Smurfs, originally created by an artist named Peyo in Europe, I entered their world with low expectations. Sony’s The Smurfs, in 3D and featuring the voices and talents of Hank Azaria (Hop), Neil Patrick Harris, Jonathan Winters, Katy Perry, and Jayma Mays (Fox’s Glee), managed to fall below them.
Beginning with a wonderfully soaring flight into their little green valley, which the narrator describes as “a place that knows no sadness”, the overwritten movie promptly dispenses with decency and deposits us into a world of toilet humor, product placement, and rehashed plot points. Trying to escape an evil sorcerer, unrecognizably played by the talented Mr. Azaria, the Smurfs enter Manhattan, intersect with a cute, expectant married couple (Harris, and Mays, who sounds like Drew Barrymore), mess up their lives and make them think about what it means to have cute little blue beings before they have one of their own. This botched attempt at a kids’ picture sprinkles goodness here and there but it’s deluged with vulgar, offensive jokes and scenes of serious physical abuse of a cat that, while it’s a computer generated cat, do not belong in a kids’ movie.
Hank Azaria and the cast do the best they can with a terrible script but the only laughs come from watching Mr. Azaria’s awful character, who’s a cross between Witchy Poo on Sid and Marty Krofft’s H.R. Pufnstuf and Sid Caesar. The character and his lines are so bad they’re hilarious and it’s as though he’s in his own movie the entire time. The Smurfs is the worst children’s movie since Universal’s 2003 bastardization of Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. With the trash out there passing as family fare, that’s saying something.