The Smurfs

Despite the abundance of strange blue humanoids featured in the movie, director Raja Gosnell is no James Cameron. This aimless monstrosity of a movie takes the innocence of the original `80s animated series and runs it through the grinder of Hollywood kitsch, so that all that`s left is a barely recognisable abomination that shambles around, mouthing the iconic theme song in a grunting basso profound.

The Smurfs is everything an animated movie shouldn`t be: it possesses a stellar voice acting cast (Kathy Perry as Smurfette, Jonathan Winters as Papa Smurf) but no soul, tight visuals but no character or charm, and painful gags instead of emotional depth. Gosnell not only pulls every contrived slapstick gag in the book, he literally pitches the Encyclopedia of Cliches at your head. Even the always worthwhile Neil Patrick Harris (Barney from TV cult hit How I Met Your Mother) looks like he`s in pain while saying his lines.

Despite all its shortcomings, however, our main gripe with The Smurfs is neither its shoddy execution nor its nauseatingly contrived melodrama, but its sheer, unforgivable cynicism. The whole movie is peppered with Sony product placements, joyless irony and MTV references that we assume were placed there to engage the older audience, but will probably only alienate the younger viewers and destroy any potential magic the film could have possessed. If there was a mastermind behind the movie, his name must have been Cynical Capitalist Smurf.

The Smurfs is not only a horrendous piece of film-making, but does injustice to the burgeoning credibility of the 3D animation genre, which gave us such wonderful fantasy narratives as Up (2009) and Wall.E (2008).

We`ll have the `la,la, la-la-la` theme music playing in our nightmares for a long, long time.

    Raphael Lim