Five little blue guys and a token female Smurfette, sucked through a wormhole, hide out from a sorcerer at marketing executive Neil Patrick Harris’ Manhattan pad in this relentlessly witless and cynical children’s movie packed with potty jokes, product plugs and double-entendres along the lines of “What the Smurf?”
What the Smurf, indeed. Ineptly directed by Raja Gosnell — the genius behind the “Scooby-Doo” features, “Big Momma’s House,” and “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” — this cheesy-looking flick has lousy animation, worse special effects and the most headache-inducing, blurry 3-D since “Clash of the Titans.”
The animated ’80s Hanna-Barbera TV show was based on a comic-book character that originated in 1958 in Belgium, and may have been that country’s most dubious import since waffles. But the show was a masterpiece compared to this drecky, borderline-sexist mix of animation and live action concocted by a team of writers whose credits include “Daddy Day Camp,” “Norbit” and “Zookeeper.”
Hank Azaria does some major scenery chewing as the wizard — relieving himself in a restaurant in front of Tim Gunn, who really shouldn’t give up his day job — who with his CGI cat has a surprisingly violent climactic confrontation with the Smurfs in Central Park.
Jonathan Winters voices the Smurfs’ Stalin-like leader, with Katy Perry as Smurfette, his sole female offspring (out of 99). Is there some unwritten law that George Lopez has to do voice work in every children’s movie? It’s not as if he’s good at it.
Aside from a Marilyn Monroe homage, the movie doesn’t really do much with its Smurfs-out-of-water premise; “The Muppets Take Manhattan” it ain’t. There are long sequences devoted to promoting FAO Schwarz and “Guitar Hero” (the blue guys sing and dance along to Aerosmith), though.
The beloved Mr. Harris, who has only been seen in bad features (“Beastly,” “The Best and the Brightest”) this year, maintains his streak with a character who works in the same Rockefeller Center office building as Justin Timberlake in last week’s “Friends With Benefits.” I doubt this movie’s target audience will care much about Harris’ ambivalence about his wide-eyed wife’s (Jayma Mays) pregnancy or his problems with his bitchy boss (Sofia Vergara).
It may be going a little far to suggest that taking your little one to “The Smurfs” — this season’s pre-K equivalent of “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” — borders on child abuse. But be warned that if you do, in the film’s words, you’ll be “up Smurf creek without a Smurfing paddle.”