The Smurfs 2

          A kid’s movie sequel usually follows the formula of the original.  Take what worked, no matter how little of it there was, and do more of it.  So in “The Smurfs 2” we get more of what the studio felt worked the first time around.  More Smurfette, more Gargamel, and more, oh, so much more smurfisms.  The less we get this time around is humans, in fact the only play they get here is heavy-handed lessons about family being what you make of it.  It’s even heavier than the excessive use of the Sony tablet.

Speaking of Sony, their doing okay on the animation front, even the films that don’t do well critically, like “Arthur Christmas” and the “Band of Misfit” pirate movie, they still manage to make a lot of money.  “The Smurfs 2” will probably be no different, if anything else it is a more simplistic plot compared to the first, which I didn’t really care for.

Actually, with fans always clamoring for all these intellectual properties to be more like the original comics or in this case cartoons, this movie is kind of reminiscent of the Saturday morning cartoon it was based on.  A misunderstanding causes one of the characters to believe something that is not true and leads them to do things that they would normally never do.  The specifics involve Smurfette (Katy Perry) and Gargamel (Hank Azaria) and Pappa Smurf played by Jonathon Winters as in his final role.  There is a poorly done parallel story involving Neal Patrick Harris’s character and Brendan Gleeson who was the only one who got me to chuckle with his line readings.  Harris felt like he was phoning it in.

All in all kids will enjoy this Smurf tale in all its blue butt glory.  For the adults, it will be kind of a chore to sit through, but its relatively painless once you get past all the smurf this and smurf that.  At least it wasn’t a big steaming pile of smurf.  Yeah, I couldn’t resist.

--Robert L. Castillo