Smurfs: The Lost Village

[Warn­ing – This review of Smurfs: The Lost Vil­lage is NSFW]

What a hor­ri­ble smurf­ing feel­ing it is to arrive at the smurf­ing cin­e­ma only to dis­cov­er that what you’re see­ing isn’t a sec­ond smurf­ing sequel to the orig­i­nal, smurf­ing awful Smurfs movies, which mixed live action with ani­ma­tion. No, the smurf­ing pen­ny drops and you realise this is an ani­mat­ed reboot, so you have to endure the same win­some smurf­ing smurf you’ve already seen in the orig­i­nal smurf­ing awful Smurfs movies. Smurf alors!

Whichev­er way you slice it, Papa Smurf is a total and com­plete smurf, and when­ev­er he enters the smurf­ing frame with his smurfy white beard and smurfy red pants/​hat com­bo, you just want to land a jack­boot right up his shiny smurf­hole. Well, he’s up to his smurf­ing old tricks again, coerc­ing his fel­low, sin­gle-trait com­rades to be real­ly smurf­ing nice all the smurf­ing time.

On her wan­der­ings, the annoy­ing­ly clean-cut Smur­fette, the sole female Smurf in the clan, hap­pens upon a tiny crack in the wall, and spies some oth­er Smurf-like crea­tures on the oth­er side. She assem­bles a band of cohorts – Brainy, who’s one clever smurf, Hefty, who has big smurf­ing mus­cles and a stu­pid smurf­ing heart tat­too on his bicep, and Clum­sy, who’s real­ly just a com­plete moth­ersmurf­ing smurf who can just go the smurf to Hell.

But before they’re able to ven­ture into this new land, the evil wiz­ard Gargamel gets wind of their plans and this undis­cov­ered race of Smurfs, and the race is on. And yes, you guessed it, Gargamel is one, gigan­tic smurf­ing smurf-ram­mer, and it’s hard not to be excit­ed by the prospect of see­ing him have pain admin­is­tered to his smurfs.

What’s most dispir­it­ing about Smurfs: The Lost Vil­lage is that it comes across as the most banal retread of every oth­er smurf­ing kid-cen­tric dig­i­tal­ly ani­mat­ed movie out there. There’s some weak smurf­ing high-jinxs, dia­logue that sounds like it came right out of a semi-con­gealed smurf, and a sto­ry that was scrawled on to the back of a beer mat with an over­sized pur­ple smurf.

And what’s real­ly sad is that you’ve got Julia smurf­ing Roberts turn­ing up for some corny smurf­ing voice work, and that you have to lis­ten to the smurf­ing atro­cious house track ​‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’ by Eif­fel 65, which just on its own makes you want to claw your own smurf off and toe-punt it into an active volcano.

But the worst thing about the film is that there’s absolute­ly no smurf­ing sub­text. There’s no inter­est­ing way to talk about the themes of the film or to tease out some dubi­ous dou­ble mean­ings. It’s so hor­ren­dous­ly affir­ma­tive and cosi­ly pro­gres­sive that it’s actu­al­ly tough to say any­thing rude about it. It’s a smurf­ing bore, though.