CinemaSerf
5
|
Aug 15, 2025
I kept putting off going to see this, I’d heard it was awful but you know what? I didn’t loathe it. Now that’s saying something as from the outset it looked more like the seven dwarves had taken the wrong direction in the forest and found themselves in the wooded equivalent of twee-on-sea! It’s all about a “Smurf” with no name who is pals with “Smurfette” who is helping him go through some ten thousand-odd descriptors for his skills, but none of them seem to fit - especially the clog-making one! He soon finds himself embroiled in a megalomaniac wheeze by the evil sorcerer “Razamel” who is on the look out for a magical book that will enable him to join the league of extraordinary wizards (or something like that) and eradicate “Papa Smurf” and all “Smurfkind”. There now follows lots of “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” type scenes; the obligatory bit of inter-dimensional travel as well as lots of opportunity for Rihanna to belt out the soundtrack that’s clearly had much more creative emphasis put on it than the script - which is not great. It does move along well enough, though, and the story does pick up for about fifteen minutes of dastardliness towards an ending that introduces some magic to the proceedings. The quality of the animation isn’t really much to write home about, with some focus on the lead characters but too many wallpaper ones to make up the numbers in an eerily computerised and sterile fashion. Quite who this is for is interesting. The kids it’s aimed at won’t have a clue who they were, nor are they likely be very engaged by the sheer derivative lack of sophistication of the whole thing. Those of us who remember the annoying blue people and their equally annoying songs from the beginning of the 1980s might want to indulge in some nostalgia for (the last) half an hour, maybe, but otherwise it’s a long old ninety minutes that probably just didn’t need making at all.
