Jonah Naplan   July 18, 2025

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been a counselor at a performing arts summer camp for a group of 30-40 little kids, most of whom will begin kindergarten this coming fall. It has been a truly humbling and eye-opening experience to engage with these youngsters over something we both adore. While watching the animated “The Little Mermaid” with them, kids in my lap and snuggled all around me, I noticed their eyes widen in fear as Ursula chewed up the scenery. They rooted for their favorite characters, laughed at the physical comedy and visual jokes, and sang along to their favorite songs. Sitting through “Smurfs” a couple days later, the newest reboot of an IP that has existed since 1958 and has seen so many failed adaptations over the years, offers precisely the opposite effect. The kids that surrounded me were anything but engaged. There were jokes but they didn’t laugh. There were songs but they didn’t sing. There were villains but they weren’t frightened. It’s an animated movie that fails on practically every level and I don’t think I would have liked it even when I was five.

After an animated TV show, “The Smurfs” and “The Smurfs 2” from 2011 and 2013, respectively, and “Smurfs: The Lost Village” from 2017, now we have a movie simply titled “Smurfs.” It centers on No Name (James Corden), the only Smurf in the village without his “thing.” For example, there’s Hefty Smurf (Alex Winter), Brainy Smurf (Xolo Maridueña), Vanity Smurf (Maya Erskine), Worry Smurf (Billie Lourd), Smurfette (Rihanna), whose defining trait is that she’s female, and the leader of the group, Papa Smurf (John Goodman). No Name sings about how he wishes for a purpose and hopes that maybe he can become “Magic Smurf.” You can guess where this is going.

In this movie we learn that Smurf Village and all its inhabitants were created at the beginning of time by a magical book (voiced by Amy Sedaris), long sought after by a trio of evil wizards, and that only Papa knows of its whereabouts. When he’s captured by the conniving Razamel (JP Karliak) who wants all the power of the book for himself, No Name leads the mission to rescue the Smurfs’ beloved patriarch. Their journey crosses paths with a variety of characters, including Papa’s long-lost brother Ken (Nick Offerman), an international division of Smurfs led by Moxie Smurf (Sandra Oh), a tribe of orange pom-pom-looking creatures, the chief of which is played by Natasha Lyonne, and, inevitably, Gargamel (also voiced by Karliak), the brother of Razamel and the little blue guys’ classic nemesis.

I have intentionally highlighted the remarkable line-up of voice actors who signed onto this project, and that’s not even all of them. Jimmy Kimmel voices a blob thing named Tardigrade, Kurt Russell is Papa Smurf’s other lost brother Ron, and Octavia Spencer, Nick Kroll, and Hannah Waddingham make up the trio of evil wizards as Asmodius, Chernobog, and Jezebeth, respectively. Dan Levy turns in perhaps the finest work of the bunch as Joel, Razamel’s long-suffering assistant who’s loyal without ever feeling completely “evil.” Movies like this seem to be attractive to celebrities because they can easily record all their lines in an hour then walk out the door with a big buck, and if the movie’s a bust, well, their faces aren’t even on-screen.

Despite all this star-power, “Smurfs” is still a massive bore from beginning to end. It’s essentially anti-entertainment. The whole thing is so bafflingly unengaging and so predictable that you’re better off watching something like “The Garfield Movie” or “Migration” for a second or a third time instead of seeing this once. It would be one thing if it was simply bad in a singular genre, but its exploration of so many ripens it for failure in multiple categories. 

It fails as a musical; the song-and-dance numbers and needle drops are uninspired and feel generated by ChatGPT. It fails as a comedy; it’s SO not funny and your kids will agree (its recurring joke of replacing words in a phrase with “Smurf”—i.e. “What the Smurf?”—is some of the lowest hanging fruit, but it also attempts that gimmick of visually displaying a concept in an overly complicated or mechanical way, such as two different representations of “time” as a universal principle in the climax). And it fails as a children’s movie; the animation is the most faded, lifeless version of that rounded, soft aesthetic common in recent movies like “Elio” and “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken,” while it barely teaches its audience any sort of important lesson about learning to love who you are, or accepting the value of standing out from the crowd, two very obvious roads to go down considering the movie’s set-up.

“Smurfs” also follows the recent trend of trying to fuse together multiple animation styles into one sequence. The result here is a little bit cool, if the weakest attempt at the gimmick yet, but by the time it arrives late into the movie, we’re so fed up with all the nonsense that preceded it that it doesn’t wash. The mind of a young child is so curious. It asks questions. It wants. It desires. It consumes media voraciously, picking and choosing what it likes and doesn’t like. Let’s not waste it on films like “Smurfs.”

Now playing in theaters.