Rihanna and James Corden team up for one of the worst films I've ever seen

Telegraph

16-07-2025

Readers familiar with the comic book characters the Smurfs will be aware that one of their most longstanding customs is swapping in the word 'Smurf' for various nouns in their ordinary speech. It's a habit which can also be usefully adopted by anyone trying to review the little blue forest sprites' latest film in a way suitable for publication in a family newspaper, because it allows one to succinctly spell out just what a colossal pile of 'Smurf' the whole thing is.
The trailers suggested a sylvan singalong adventure in the same vein as the (rather fun and lovely) Trolls films from DreamWorks: alas, Smurfs makes even the middling Trolls 3 (Trolls Band Together) look like late-period Hayao Miyazaki by comparison.
It has all the charm and personality of a dented traffic cone and features perhaps the single most tin-eared screenplay – in which Papa Smurf is kidnapped by the villainous wizard Gargamel, and Smurfette leads a globe-trotting mission to free him – that I have ever encountered in my two decades as a critic.
'Well, that was quite the successful spite mission,' says Gargamel in one scene (spite mission?) – while elsewhere a sentient spell book called Jaunty keeps saying 'cha cha cha!', very annoyingly, for no discernible reason, and a second sidekick character, a slow-witted turtle, uses 'what the shell?' as a mild surrogate expletive not once, but twice. Did ChatGPT take a pass at the script? And if not, should it have?
You'd pity the cast, if not for the fact that – easy cheque aside – it's unclear why any of them are in it. John Goodman, Nick Offerman and Kurt Russell play various Smurf elders (naturally the Smurfs are no longer just playful magical creatures but are descended from ancient guardians of the blah blah blah), while Smurfette, the village's lone female Smurf, is voiced in a husky contralto by the R&B singer Rihanna: perhaps the person who sounds least like a Smurf on all of planet Earth, with the arguable exception of Tom Waits.
James Corden, formerly of the first two Trolls films, co-stars as the bluntly named No Name, who has yet to work out his signature Smurf ability – like Hefty Smurf, Brainy Smurf and the others. The upshot of this is much unfortunate (and unintentional?) double-entendre-laden dialogue in which Corden constantly complains about 'not being able to find [his] thing', conjuring mental images to freeze the blood.
The plot involves a handful of Smurfs boomeranging around a few seemingly randomly selected live-action locations – Paris, the Australian Outback, a motorway just outside of Munich – while Gargamel's brother Razamel (JP Karliak) tries to catch them in the hope of stealing the sentient spell book (he's welcome to it) and thereby restoring the power of an ancient wizarding cabal.
The animated characters mesh quite nicely with these real-world backdrops – and the artists generally find workable ways to replicate the classic spirited comic strip style in three-dimensional space. But a baleful cut-price air looms over the whole exercise: even a conceptually imaginative dash through a number of alternative stylistic dimensions – claymation, 8-bit video game, anime and so on – looks like an afterthought, hastily cobbled together to give the trailer more juice. (And was also transparently cribbed from the 'abstract thought' sequence in Inside Out.)
But will it keep the kids quiet for an hour and a half? Probably not, though it is loud enough that you won't be able to hear them complain.