REVIEW: 'Smurfs' get surreal, which might be lost on the kids

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The biggest surprise about the new “Smurfs” movie was the smattering of applause that bubbled forth in the darkness of a recent, kid-friendly preview screening as the credits began to roll. But the animated film – a complicated portal-hopping adventure set in the (groan) multiverse that also incorporates a smattering of live action, mostly scenery and no actors – does have its moments.

For instance, I briefly smiled when the titular blue “rat-monkeys,” as the film’s bad guy calls these troll-like imps, dimension-hop from one world to the next in an effort to save all that is good from the evil twin wizards Gargamel and Razamel (voice of JP Karliak). Each dimension is rendered, cleverly, in a distinct style of animation: stop-motion clay, a child’s crayon drawing, 1970s-era 8-bit video graphics, subtitled Japanese anime and, for reasons I don’t fully understand, one surreal undersea vignette featuring a talking tardigrade – a teensy creature that looks like a bug in a fat suit – voiced by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.

The surprise is not that anyone liked the film. There’s no accounting for taste, especially when it comes to offbeat fare like the Smurfs, an intellectual property that has it roots in Belgium, where, in 1958, comic artist Pierre Culliford, working under the pseudonym Peyo, created them as Les Schtroumpfs, but that the robust clapping seems to have come almost entirely from grown-ups.

During the movie, their young charges appeared to fidget and shift impatiently, greeting their parents’ ovation by sitting on their hands or, more likely, using them to scratch their heads in confusion. The reaction from the children in the crowd seemed to echo the closing words of Rihanna, who as the character Smurfette, articulates what I imagine more than a few in the theatre may have been thinking: “Don’t crunch our brains so much!”

The script by Pam Brady (a “South Park” producer and writer of the R-rated films “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut” and “Team America: World Police”) is all over the map, sometimes quite literally. Director Chris Miller (“Puss in Boots”) opens the action amid the mushroom-shaped houses of Smurf Village before switching to Paris – then the Australian Outback, Munich and points beyond.

It begins by presenting a bit of lore that is easily the most unsettling thing about Smurfdom: the fact that Smurfette, the lone female among a host of males, was created from clay by the evil wizards specifically to lure the Smurfs into their clutches.

More tedious scene-setting follows. Smurfette explains that all Smurfs, like Snow White’s dwarfs, are named for character attributes: Hefty, Lazy, Handy, Grouchy, etc.

All Smurfs, that is, except Smurfette – she’s just a girl, it’s implied, isn’t that enough? – and one called No Name (James Corden), who hasn’t yet found his thing, although he aspires to become a practitioner of the magic arts.

No Name’s search for identity is really what propels this overly busy story forward, in an otherwise perfunctory plot about good vs. evil that gets underway after Smurf patriarch Papa Smurf (John Goodman) is kidnapped by the wizards’ factotum, Joel (Dan Levy). This precipitates a delegation of Smurfs to go on a quest, seeking help from someone named Ken – whoever and wherever he may be – as Papa urged them to do just before he got sucked into a black hole-like vortex in the sky. Other portals include the horn of a gramophone.

Yes, the story is hard to follow, and not just for youngsters. (I would urge you not to try.) It involves appearances by a Parisian neighbourhood watch group run by – well whaddya know? – a second female Smurf, called Moxie (Sandra Oh); a hairball-looking thing with the flatulent-sounding moniker of Mama Poot (Natasha Lyonne); and a magical talking book who goes by Jaunty (Amy Sedaris). Each of these characters has more or less zilch to do with the predictable message of the story, which is, as spelled out by Smurfette to No Name: “You’ve got a lot more magic in you than you think. You’ve just got to let it out.”

The more interesting question is “Who is ‘Smurfs’ actually playing to?” On the one hand, its predictable reliance on naughty wordplay, inspired by the seemingly limitless meanings of the words “smurf” and “smurfy” (e.g., “I think I smurfed my pants”) would seem to suggest grade school.

On the other hand, the movie really leans into the self-referential absurdism. After a scene featuring No Name riding in the pouch of a bouncing CGI mama kangaroo as Smurfette sings to him, “Don’t ever give up,” No Name breaks the fourth wall by saying out loud what the rest of us are thinking: “That part with the kangaroo was a little weird.”

True, but never quite weird enough. “Smurfs” may be all over the multiverse, but it doesn’t land anywhere worth writing home about.

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Two stars. Rated PG. At theatres. Contains action, coarse language and some rude humour. 89 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.