Quick, somebody let me know if I’ve somehow drifted off into sleep and am now dreaming about a fictional place where movie posters are naturally supposed to be this stupendously dumb. Sigh. This is reality, isn’t it? I’ve moved on from thinking The Smurfs 2 is a pointless film, because those conversations have been had. So the question becomes, “Will it succeed in the many places where the original filmfailed?” If we’re judging things by movie posters alone, we may be in for a disaster.
Even if we’re taking the film’s first trailer into account – you know, the one that featured Gargamel’s new creation belching and Azrael putting his paw over his face in shame – it still looks as though it's going to be a blue-tinted stinker. The completely generic posters come courtesy of the film's official Facebook page, and not only do they showcase the bad guy characters giving the peace sign as a way of depicting the “2” in the film title, but in doing so, they’re giving the Smurfs bunny ears - which is just short of a “Kick Me” sign on the scale of lame-ass methods of passive aggressive pranking. In case you can’t tell, I don’t care for these posters, and they fall squarely into the copycat form of children’s movie posters that I wrote about a while back. Anyway, here’s the second poster.
The two non-Smurfs are Vexy (Christina Ricci) and Hackus (JB Smoove), two Smurf-like Naughties created by Gargamel. Only Smurfette knows the way to turn them into real Smurfs, so they plan to make her as naughty as they are. Gargamel kidnaps her. They go to Paris. Rolling Ferris Wheels ensue. The movie comes out on July 31st and will probably make a stupid amount of money at the box office. Another sigh. Check out the trailer below.
