An average movie

I wasn’t expecting much from this flick but, since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out anyway. Well, to be honest, I have to admit that it was not so bad after all. There were in fact 2 reasons why I might have been more lenient with this movie than it actually deserved. First of all, I was really stoned when I watched it and it was actually quite fun to see this old cartoon characters that I used to watch on TV back in the 80’s. The other reason was that the 2 previous movies with these characters (‘The Smurfs’ released in 2011 and ‘The Smurfs 2’ released in 2013), combining live action with CGI characters (such an awful gimmick), were just so lame. At least, this time, they went for an animated reboot and, as a result, it felt much more faithful to the comic-book and the original cartoon show. To be honest, the animation was nothing really amazing but it was decent enough. Concerning the story, they focused on Smurfette (who’s, for some reason, always voiced by a famous singer in all these movies) and why she is so different than the other Smurfs. The issue with this approach is that how deep should they go into this? I mean, it creates all kinds of narrative issues because the smurfs seem to be asexual and, yet, they are all attracted to the Smurfette. As a result, they invented this whole new village with only  Smurf girls this time which seemed like a good idea since Smurfette was always so lonely but, then, not only it vastly contradicted the original material, it did create a whole new set of other issues. Are they going to live side-by-side? Are the smurf guys and girls going to switch villages to live together as couples? Is actually one village a gay village and the other one a lesbian village? There was also tons of magical stuff this time and I didn’t recall this from the cartoon I used  to watch as a kid but I have to admit that it was more than 30 years ago. Anyway, to conclude, I was probably too generous with my rating here but I think it is worth a look, at least, if you have some young kids to entertain.