The Smurfs (2011)
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The Smurfs Movie Review
The Smurfs is a 2011 family live-action/animated film directed by Raja Gosnell and starring Hank Azaria and Neil Patrick Harris. It’s a very problematic movie.
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“You smurfed with the wrong girl!“
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This is one of those movies which entirely ruin your childhood and the animated series it is based on. With a couple of exceptions here and there and I will get to those later, this is largely a very mediocre flick which frustrated me to no end. So basically the Smurfs here spend very little time in their village and are instead transported to New York to an apartment of a married expectant couple. Family drama ensues and the clash of those two worlds.
I liked the scenes in the village quite a bit and I liked the ending, but the entire part in the real world was very troublesome as the film relied heavily on immature humor and stupid action to sell it to the youngest kids. I personally absolutely despised their humor with the Smurf word which was repeated throughout in every imaginable context with many different meanings and it was just too stupid to bear and very unfunny.
I nonetheless found some very solid elements in the film including a fine story about a man being scared to be a father and the blue guys help him out eventually. That was typical family stuff, but nonetheless I really liked it mostly because Papa Smurf and Patrick’s relationship really worked and was quite moving. But all the other relationships and interactions in the movie are so bad that this one couldn’t help it in the long run.
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I loved Neil Patrick Harris’ performance here. He struggled during this decade in feature films, but here is an exception as his performance is terrific, emotional and his character is very likable. But his wife is entirely forgettable and the same goes for Sofia Vergara whose role here is very weak and unnecessary.
But this is the movie about Smurfs and they should be the center of the attention, right? Well, no. Because the movie made a huge mistake of relying so heavily on the humans, the blue protagonists were thus left underutilized and underdeveloped. Smurfette needed a bigger role and only Papa Smurf is memorable here. Clumsy got a fine, but typical role and others are all entirely underused. As for Gargamel, I liked Hank Azaria’s performance, even though it was very over-the-top, but it suits the character. The cat is also a lot of fun. But the villain definitely needed better scenes.
The Smurfs mixes animation with live-action solidly. This isn’t groundbreaking or anything, but it isn’t bad either as it looks good. They look polished and the village at the beginning was gorgeously rendered and I so wish that I had spend more time there instead of in boring NYC.
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The score is annoying and overly modern which is the problem the entire movie shares. It’s just way too modernized for my personal taste and the humor is particularly terrible with the dialogue being borderline offensive. I would also say that the script is weak and ultimately it suffers from relying very little on the fantasy elements and its protagonists. There’s also very little to be enjoyed here if you’re an adult and very little of the classic charm I wanted from this source material.
The Smurfs definitely has a couple of sweet moments here and there with Neil Patrick Harris delivering a good performance as well, but the characterization is very weak, the script is uninspired and the movie is a typically modernized recent family flick which relies too little on the titular characters themselves and too much on immature humor, bad dialogue and dull storytelling.
