Smurfs: The Lost Village (2017)

Smurfs: The Lost Village (2017)

IMDB Rating 5.8/10 (as on 01.04.2017)

In this fully animated, all-new take on the Smurfs, a mysterious map sets Smurfette and her friends Brainy, Clumsy and Hefty on an exciting race through the Forbidden Forest leading to the discovery of the biggest secret in Smurf history.

Director: Kelly Asbury

Writers: Stacey Harman, Pamela Ribon

Stars: Ariel Winter, Joe Manganiello, Michelle Rodriguez

PG | 1h 29min | Animation, Adventure, Comedy

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆  

Nothing out of the blue here

Smurfs assemble … for a new adventure, this one taking on gender issues – the distinction between boy smurfs and girl smurfs. In one smurf village, benignly presided over by Papa Smurf (voiced by Mandy Patinkin) they are all male, except for Smurfette (Demi Lovato) a brightly optimistic female creature not unlike Joy from Inside Out. The question of where baby smurfs come from if female smurfs are such an exotic rarity is obliquely touched on when we encounter the evil wizard Gargamel (Rainn Wilson) in his far-off lair who wishes to enslave smurfs and harvest their little blue bodies as his own awful energy source. It is the adventure involved in confronting him that leads us to the lost village of the title, to a whole new, radically different smurf community and to its leader Smurfwillow (Julia Roberts). Fans of smurfiness may well like it, and Gargamel gets some nice lines, but I have to say that both script and animation seemed are entirely predictable, as if generated by some computer software.

  Read full review at The Guardian

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆  

A trippy treat for under-8s, for everyone else the blues

Previously on The Smurfs, it got weird: Brendan Gleeson was stripped naked and fell into a dumpster. Nothing quite so weird happens in Smurfs: The Lost Village, the third of their worryingly persistent big-screen outings, perhaps because all the actors have skedaddled after a long and searching think about their lives.

Gleeson’s gone. Neil Patrick Harris has debonairly excused himself. Even Hank Azaria, who played the snaggle-toothed villain Gargamel in 1&2, is absent, and the character now appears in animated form, voiced in might-as-well fashion by Rainn Wilson.

Other than him and his familiars, we are left wholly with Smurfs, Smurfville, or whatever it’s called, and some bulbous, unappealing animated backdrops, as if their covert takeover of Real Earth has run into contractual difficulties. Real Paris featured last time. Now nowhere will consent to have a Smurfs film shot in it, and no one will consent to star. Not even Chernobyl or Ant and Dec.

If you’re interested, this contains double the number of Smurfs ever previously seen, thanks to the discovery of an all-female enclave somewhere deep in the woods. Smurfette, lone ladySmurf among the original tribe, has company, at last! But the female Smurfs behave exactly like male ones with wigs, so you couldn’t call them a radical innovation.

Smurfette, a folkloric femme fatale moulded from a lump of clay, has a lot to answer for, specifically for kicking over the poor, defenceless Columbia Statue-of-Liberty lady before the film has even started. What did Columbia Pictures ever do to her, except enslave her in a soon-to-be-billion-dollar franchise with Papa Smurf as her unsettling jailer?

“Long have you searched for these creatures of blue / But this hat comes from somewhere new,” booms a voice from a cauldron at Gargamel. Who’s he searching for, Lee Ryan? One minute, you may find your eyelids drooping; the next, Smurfs are being chased down a warren by luminous green rabbits. Soon they’re all frolicking outdoors in a sort of Watership ho-down.

Under-eights may thrill to this, or they may, in years to come, confuse it with their first LSD trip. Just don’t say you weren’t warned.

Read full review at Telegraph

The beloved blue creatures return in this all-animated reboot of the franchise, voiced by Julia Roberts, Demi Lovato and Mandy Patinkin.

Sony Pictures Animation has gone back to the well and unapologetically left adults behind for the third entry in their Smurfs franchise. Discarding the combination of live-action and animation that marked the first two efforts, Smurfs: The Lost Village is strictly animated and geared only for younger viewers. The reboot directed by Kelly Asbury (Shrek 2) should please its target audience while providing little entertainment value to any adult chaperones who appreciated Neil Patrick Harris and Hank Azaria’s enjoyably over-the-top turns in the first two films.

Co-scripter Pamela Ribon introduces a pronounced feminist theme into the story similar to that of her most recent credit, Moana. Set entirely in the Smurfs’ fantastical village (no trips to New York City here), it revolves around Smurfette (Demi Lovato), the only female of the species. Upon discovering a mysterious map, she sets off with her fellow Smurfs Brainy (Danny Pudi), Clumsy (Jack McBrayer) and Hefty (Joe Manganiello) — no extra points for guessing these characters’ personality traits — through the Forbidden Forest in search of answers.

Featuring computer animation so brightly colored and frenetically paced that it potentially threatens the well-being of both diabetics and epileptics, the film is purely for the small fry. Unless, that is, you’re the type of adult who finds amusement in the wizard’s description of one of his secret ingredients for a spell as “a piece of cheese I left in my underpants.” Very young children may become upset when Smurfette — spoiler alert — becomes transformed into an inanimate lump of clay (admittedly, not much different from her usual appearance), before she’s — spoiler alert, again — miraculously brought back to life.

Why the makers of animated films, especially those geared to younger audiences, feel the need to pony up for big-name talent to provide the voices is a mystery. It’s pretty unlikely that children will care, for instance, that Joe Manganiello plays Hefty, and any mothers in attendance will only be annoyed that he’s not in the picture for real, with his shirt off.

Featuring a relentless barrage of the sort of bland pop songs designed to fill out a soundtrack CD, Smurfs: The Lost Village is a mediocre effort that nonetheless succeeds in its main goal of keeping its blue characters alive for future merchandising purposes.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆  

Kids' classic gets a welcome gender shake-up

Someday, with luck, Hollywood will move on from irreverent riffs on antiquated cartoon characters. But in the meantime, Smurfs: The Lost Village is much to be preferred to The LEGO Batman Movie.

Whatever I was expecting from the latest Smurf movie, it wasn't a sophisticated work of revisionist fan-fiction centred on the controversial figure of Smurfette (voiced here by Demi Lovato​).

But that's what journeyman director Kelly Asbury delivers here, working from a script credited to two women, Stacey Harman and Pamela Ribon​ (although, typically for computer animation, it seems many writers were involved).

To back up for a moment, the question of what gender means to the gnome-like Smurfs is complicated by uncertainty over whether Smurfette, the one female citizen of their forest village, can strictly be called a Smurf at all.

As Jake Gyllenhaal​ helpfully reminded us in Donnie Darko, Smurfette was fashioned out of clay by the evil wizard Gargamel​ (Rainn Wilson) to lure the Smurfs into his power. Only the magic of village chief Papa Smurf (Mandy Patinkin​) allowed her to become something like a real girl.

There's no escaping the misogyny of this bizarre origin story, especially as Smurfette has continued to be defined by her femininity, where her male counterparts are assigned individual character traits: Brainy Smurf (Danny Pudi), Clumsy Smurf (Jack McBrayer) and so forth.

Happily, this is still a children's film first and foremost, animated in a style that's frankly cartoony rather than "exquisite", in the manner of modern Disney. Most of the big laughs at the screening I attended came from the pratfalls of Gargamel, a classic bumbling villain accompanied by a pair of mute but slightly sharper pets.

Harmless as it appears, The Lost Village supplies at least one reason to worry: as we learnt from the response to last year's Ghostbusters, to tinker with beloved childhood mythology is to play with fire.

Are we due for a furious backlash on Twitter, complaining that Asbury and his team have betrayed the traditional, manly Smurf spirit? Such critics, if you'll pardon me, should get smurfed.

Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald