This wasn’t supposed to happen. I watched The Smurfs a month ago (dubbed into Greek) and promptly forgot about it. There were other films to write about. I was due to go on holiday (and did). It would surely be easy enough to review something – anything – else when the time came. Little did I know the multiplex was about to sink into a slump, with just a handful of new titles released in the past month – and meanwhile The Smurfs has been packing them in. Queues have been forming. People have been fighting for tickets. It’s become a bit surreal. I have no choice. Digging out my meagre notes, searching deep in the recesses of my mind, I try to remember The Smurfs and find … nothing.
Blue creatures, obviously. I remember that. Blueness is important (can I resist the temptation to call it a ‘blue movie’? too late!). Would the Smurfs have worked just as well if Peyo, their Belgian creator, had made them green? (Probably.) How about red? (Unlikely.) Blue creatures with clever names, like Brainy and Grouchy and Clumsy (or Greek equivalents). “Do you get your names when you’re born, or after you’ve exhibited certain traits?” asks Neil Patrick Harris – a good question, which is why I remember it. Surely there’s a tear-jerking drama to be made (someday) about a Smurf who’s given the wrong name, and spends his life struggling to live up to it. Then there’s the bit where Neil says he’s using Google, and the Smurfs go “Ooooohhhh!” in unison; I remember that too. It’s one of the few lines that made me chuckle, just because it’s so silly – though it’s probably not the best idea, when you think about it, to have our impressionable five-year-olds picturing Google as a magical marvel, as opposed to a money-grubbing corporation.
What else, what else? The Smurfs end up in New York through some kind of portal, pursued by Gargamel (hammy Hank Azaria) and his CGI cat. Neil and his bubbly girlfriend (are they married? I forget) find their lives disrupted by the little blue things, but of course learn to love them eventually. Neil is also going to be a daddy, and receives advice from Papa Smurf on the joys of fatherhood – one of those nauseating “We are a family” scenes that keep turning up in children’s films, and there’s just no call for them. Kids don’t care about fatherhood and family values. If Hollywood wants to preach in its kidpics, at least preach about bullying or doing your homework, something that’s actually relevant to the target audience. This is just pandering to parents’ groups, so they’ll laud the studios for being ‘responsible’ and give a pass to all kinds of formulaic crap guaranteed to leave their precious offspring’s minds even duller than they already were.
But I digress. The real question isn’t why The Smurfs is so bad, burying the antic spirit of the original beneath a twin onslaught of action slapstick and mawkish cant. The real question is why people are going to see it in such numbers. Yes, the TV show was huge in Cyprus 20 years ago, and yes, parents want to keep their kids quiet for a couple of hours – but why go to a film that you know will besmirch your fond memories, and why take your kids to something that you know will be dreadful? Actually, I take back that last part. It’s hard enough being a parent, and younger kids are notoriously undiscriminating. But queues outside the cinema? For The Smurfs? That’s just not right.
There’s one more thing I just remembered – too late, alas, or I could’ve written the whole review in this style – viz. the way The Smurfs uses ‘smurf’ as an all-purpose substitute for other words. The result is smurfing annoying, done without any smurf or reason, full of incon-smurf-encies and arbitrary smurf, all too typical of the film’s smurfy smurfiness. I can smurf how it might’ve looked good on smurf, but onscreen – after a smurfly overlong 103 minutes – it’s enough to drive you up the smurf. What the smurf is wrong with people anysmurf? Can’t they see how poor The Smurfs is – how formulaic, how forgettable? What can I say? Smurf happens.
DIRECTED BY Raja Gosnell
STARRING Neil Patrick Harris, Hank Azaria, Jayma Mays
US 2011 103 mins.
