“Do you want to see a superhero movie?” I asked my niece to which she responded, “I DO WILL YOU TAKE ME.” Which is the last time that the option to take my niece to see Fantastic Four seemed like a real possibility, because shortly after that her parents rightly noted that a six-year old who cries at the sad parts of Moana probably doesn’t have the constitution to watch Galatacus threaten to destroy the Jetsons utopia while some stretchy guy and his family try to stop him. I had vowed earlier this month to die rather than take the monsters to see Smurfs, because it seemed like something you would make as a joke or a dare and less as a truly artistic endeavor, and though its not quite a live-action remake or a sequel watched out of order, something about subjecting a young mind to it felt deeply wrong and disturbing. Which is why the thing that really moved the needle was being told on a couple different occasions that once I suggested seeing a (superhero) movie at an actual, real theater (something my niece has never done before), she was not going to let it go until it happened. The following morning, when I came upstairs for breakfast, she was singing, “MOVIE THEATER MOVIE THEATER MOVIE” and a little part of me that held out hope that I could convince her to go to an arcade and act like none of this had ever happened died inside me. Her mom said she would come with me, I think because she was worried that I was going to bolt at some point and maybe claw my eyes out, but ostensibly so that my niece could get the emotional support that would be lacking from me taking her alone.
Smurfs presents itself in my view as a sort of low-budget Trolls clone, because all of the Smurfs are the exact same model, but actually it’s kind of better and worse than Trolls? All of the songs are, as far as I can tell, just straight Rihanna covers covered by Rihanna? There aren’t any medleys or LEGO-type earworms, which makes the fact that they picked one of the most innovative and viral artists of our time the main character of the movie a little bit weird, but if you think about the casting overall, it becomes clear pretty quickly that the object of this movie was to give a lot of people a little bit of work in a recording studio and then call it a day.
Some of the stuff that worked for me was the absurdist humor, like the interdimensional beings who grift people who use their portals wrong, or the montage that takes us through different art styles as they pass through dimensions. Friend scoffed at me and said, “They did that way better in Inside Out 2 AND TROLLS,” which leads me to believe I might have been the target audience for the slop they’d lifted from their more pricey competitors. There are a few places where characters are carelessly mean to one another, which works really well, and the script for the most part is pretty self aware that it’s not giving you the best possible movie.
Probably the most interesting thing visually that Smurfs does is pull a Who Framed Roger Rabbit by plopping the CGI guys down in a live-action setting several times throughout the movie (Australia, Paris, and Germany), but it doesn’t actually allow them to interact with their environment in any ways that are innovative or useful, so it’s kind of a waste. Friend says that this is actually borrowed from previous Smurfs movies which I guess, again, makes me the patsy, but it’s so weird that Smurfs is relying on me not having seen a Smurfs before, right? It’s also weird that Papa Smurf et al. spend so much time reminiscing about “Ron,” even a moment for an inconveniently-timed flashback at a moment of high drama, without any payoff. Friend head-canon’d a cooler plot, where the casting of Kurt Russell signaled a bigger role for Ron in which he’s been permanently changed by the 9th dimension where he’s been imprisoned for so many years and it turns him into the Big Bad, but, alas, there was not enough time or money to pay him to reprise his role from Guardians of the Galaxy 2.
