Directed by Raja Gosnell
Columbia Pictures, 2011
Genre
Adventure, Comedy
Awards
None Known
Review
The Smurf village is happily planning their Blue Moon Festival when Papa Smurf sees a disturbing vision about what will happen in the future. Not long after, Gargamel and his cat Azrael show up in the village, scattering the Smurfs as they run for their lives! Clumsy Smurf goes the wrong direction and a handful of others, including Papa Smurf and Smurfette (voiced by Katy Perry), decide they needed to try to catch him. They stumble into a cave where a mysterious portal opened due to the rise of the Blue Moon. Gargamel and Azrael catch up, but the Smurfs escape through the portal, where the villains quickly follow. All the characters end up in New York and stumble into the lives of cosmetic company VP, Patrick Winslow (Neil Patrick Harris) and his pregnant wife, Grace Winslow. The Smurfs are in desperate need of finding a "stargazer" (telescope), a spell book (which turns out to be a book of their comic strips), and an incantation to summon a Blue Moon and open another portal to return home, before Gargamel and Azrael catch them! While trying to accomplish this, the Smurfs, especially Clumsy Smurf, constantly get in the way of Patrick completing an important work project, causing him to express his frustration and worry about having a baby. A cute family movie, definitely geared more for children than their parents, that shows people can have more than one trait and even Clumsy can be a hero!
Opinion
While the idea behind Patrick's anxieties of becoming a father may have been intended to keep the parents engaged in what is mostly a children's movie, it fell a little short of the mark and took up screen time with scenes that may be lost on the children viewers. As I am mostly unfamiliar with the Smurf world, I can't speak to the accuracy of how the Smurfs were portrayed, but there was enough information included in the movie for those unfamiliar with their world to follow along. Katy Perry being a voice actor and Neil Patrick Harris playing the main human character may be large draws for the tween crowds.
Ideas
This is good movie to show during family movie days at public libraries. The theme that people can change and don't always have to be what people think they are (Clumsy managing to save the day in the end) is predictable, but a good message nonetheless.
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