Also checked out – a few weeks late – the new Smurfs: The Lost Village movie. This is technically Smurfs 3 but is being treated as a reboot of the series. Which is for the best given how not-so-good the live action/CGI movies were. This is a full cartoon version of the movies – no live action humans allowed.
I’ll give this movie some credit – it’s lead character is Smurfette. Smurfette looks around and realize every Smurf is a something. Hefty Smurf is strong, Brainy is smart, Clumsy is clumsy, Papa is the leader, Vanity is vain, and Table-Biting Smurf bites tables(?). But Smurfette doesn’t DO anything and she doesn’t know what an “ette” is. In other words, the movie acknowledges and confronts the Smurfette Principle.
This movie is a kid’s movie first and foremost. It makes few, if any, attempts to entertain the adults in the audience with inside jokes, off-kilter jokes, or jokes in bad taste. Happily, the movie is good enough as a kids movie. It’s not intolerable and stupid – it just tells the story it tells with enough energy to keep the kiddies entertained.
That’s about it. It’s fine. It confronts the sexism built into The Smurfs and gives a decent female empowerment story (without overdoing it). But mainly it’s just an inoffensive and good-enough kid’s cartoon. It feels very much like something that could have come out of the original tv show.
Score: 74