Smurfs (dir. Chris Miller)
Certificate: U
Running Time: 92 mins
UK Distributor: Paramount Pictures
UK Release Date: 18 July 2025
WHO’S IN SMURFS?
Rihanna, James Corden, Nick Offerman, J.P. Karliak, Sandra Oh, Maya Erskine, Kurt Russell, John Goodman, Xolo Maridueña, Dan Levy, Amy Sedaris, Natasha Lyonne, Octavia Spencer, Nick Kroll, Hannah Waddingham, Alex Winter, Billie Lourd, Marshmello, Jimmy Kimmel
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Chris Miller (director), Pam Brady (writer), Rihanna (producer, composer), Jay Brown, Ryan Harris and Tyran Smith (producers), Henry Jackman (composer), Matt Landon (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
After Papa Smurf (Goodman) is kidnapped, Smurfette (Rihanna) leads a perilous rescue mission…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON SMURFS?
When you really stop to think about it, the Smurfs are weird as hell. After all, they’re a race of tiny blue creatures living in a village of mushrooms where there’s only one woman, everyone else is named after their only character attribute, and white hats and trousers are the one acceptable fashion trait. Sounds to me like Belgian artist Peyo, in coming up with the idea of them, encountered some mushrooms of his own, and not the kind that one lives in.
But only now, with this latest attempt to bring the Smurfs to the big screen – after Raja Gosnell’s universally despised live-action/CG hybrids, and the since-forgotten fully animated Smurfs: The Lost Village – has Hollywood finally realised how weird they truly are, leaning into that as hard as possible to deliver something closer than before (at least visually) to Peyo’s original vision. That doesn’t make it good, mind you, for director Chris Miller’s take – simply titled Smurfs – is still filled with plenty of the same problems that derailed the previous attempts, with not even its distinct brand of weirdness being enough to save it.
The film begins in the Smurf Village, where everyone is happy and comfortable with their own identity – except for one Smurf, quite cruelly known as No Name (James Corden), who unlike his contemporaries such as Brainy Smurf (Xolo Maridueña), Hefty Smurf (Alex Winter) and even Smurfette (Rihanna) lacks a distinctive personality trait that seems to fit with his chosen name. However, after suddenly acquiring mysterious powers from a magical book that’s voiced by Amy Sedaris – just go with it – No Name accidentally attracts the attention of evil wizard Razamel (J.P. Karliak), the brother of the Smurfs’ human enemy Gargamel (also Karliak), who promptly kidnaps their leader Papa Smurf (John Goodman) and holds him in another dimension. Smurfette, No Name and a bunch of other Smurfs promptly set out on a mission across the multiverse to locate Papa Smurf’s brother Ken (Nick Offerman) and not only rescue their patriarch but also learn their destiny as the galaxy’s greatest defenders.
It may sound like Smurfs is an incredibly plot-heavy movie, way more so than one would ever expect from the Smurfs, but the truth is that plot is not even secondary in a film that tries doing too many things simultaneously and doesn’t know how to balance them all. At first, it appears that it’s trying to cynically replicate the formula to DreamWorks’s Trolls franchise, to where it opens almost identically to the first movie with an opening song-and-dance melody that introduces the characters one by one (oh, it’s also a musical, by the way), but with very little of the energy or even colourfulness that elevated the Trolls films. Then, it becomes a multiverse-hopping movie that is surprisingly harder to follow than in Everything Everywhere All at Once, as characters will travel to live-action locations inhabited by real humans as well as ones where they’re Claymation figures and even 8-bit video game characters. And as if that wasn’t enough, we then get some heavy Smurfs lore that makes it suddenly feel like a Marvel movie, with prominent figures effectively becoming Doctor Strange by the end of it.
This is a strangely cluttered movie, one that clearly has plenty of ideas but couldn’t just pick one, and by instead choosing to do all of them Miller has somehow made the most ambitious yet unfocused Smurfs movie yet. The script, credited to Pam Brady who has written much funnier films like Hot Rod, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and Team America: World Police but also Judd Apatow’s much less funnier The Bubble (I’ll leave it to you to guess which movie Smurfs is closer to in terms of comedy), is too busy attempting to expand its far-reaching narrative to pay much attention towards random jokes that are largely just puns or modern-day references or the occasional obligatory “substituting the world “Smurf” for a much crasser noun or verb” gag. Nor does it bother much with its characters, who for a film about one Smurf struggling to define his personality don’t seem to have much of their own, and are often voiced by an utter waste of A-list talent that you don’t even know are in the movie until the ending credits, where you’re shocked that certain throwaway figures are played for whatever reason by the likes of Sandra Oh, Octavia Spencer and even Kurt Russell.
In between all of that are some extremely generic musical numbers that predominantly feel like an excuse to have Rihanna sing a couple of times in the movie (she’s also a producer), to where they even bust out one of her own tracks during a disco scene. While it’s thankfully nowhere near as self-gratifying as in Hurry Up Tomorrow, which spent an entire scene dissecting one of The Weeknd’s most popular songs, her gargantuan presence in a role that isn’t even that of the main protagonist is nonetheless distracting, especially given the fact that Rihanna is oddly miscast as Smurfette, her vocal delivery rarely matching the overall character design or even the way she’s written. It’s like if someone cast Britney Spears to voice Velma from Scooby-Doo, and then she spent much of it suddenly bursting into song instead of chasing the ghost with the rest of the Mystery Inc gang; it just doesn’t feel right for the character.
At least the animation is quite good, impressively replicating the original Peyo designs with hints of hand-drawn sketch outlines here and there while also being visually distinct from previous Smurfs movies, even when it briefly dabbles in live-action. But that’s not enough to shake off its overwhelming weirdness, which largely feels weird for the sake of it and not for any real narrative purpose, resulting in an unfocused and strangely unentertaining film where you’re not laughing as much as it wants you to, nor are you even all that fascinated with the odd turns that it makes. The Trolls movies, which this one wants to be so bad but for a lot of reasons isn’t, at least embraced its surreal and exceptionally colourful nature, whereas this feels like a more soulless and corporate imitation, which is odd given that the Smurfs are arguably the more iconic cartoon characters, and sadly have yet to star in a major Hollywood film that really sees them beyond a bunch of pandering marketing opportunities.
That, in and of itself, is a whole lot of Smurf.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Smurfs is an overly ambitious but ultimately empty attempt to revitalise the franchise thanks to a cluttered script that tries to do too much while dishing out underwhelming humour and generic musical numbers, with not even the stylish animation being enough to compensate for its ineffectual weirdness.
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