The two Alvin and the Chipmunks movies and Enchanted were both huge family hits, so it was probably only a matter of time before the two would collide uncomfortably in a movie trying to mimic both of them. That movie seems to be The Smurfs, the live-action/CGI hybrid coming this summer to entertain kids who are bored by spending time outdoors. While the first trailer tried to pull one over on us by presenting it as an action film before giving into the Smurfy madness, the new one that debuted today at Yahoo! kicks off in the idyllic Smurf village before the evil Gargamel shows up and somehow sends the whole Smurfs gang through a wormhole to New York City. You know, like you do.
Check out the trailer below.
Though I'm sure the closer parallel to the movie is in fact Alvin and the Chipmunks, I can't shake the Enchanted similarities, watching a creature from another mystical world (OK, multiple creatures this time) move in with a straitlaced New Yorker (Neil Patrick Harris instead of Patrick Dempsey) while being chased by an evil sorcerer (Hank Azaria's Gargamel, to be fair, does look more silly than Susan Sarandon's wicked queen). The problem is that The Smurfs looks a whole lot dumber and less interesting than Enchanted, though you probably could have guessed that before even watching the trailer. Much as Azaria and Harris seem to be doing their best, there's not really doing much with a movie featuring lines like "You've smurfed with the wrong Smurf."
The Smurfs opens on July 29, so if you're running a day camp this summer you probably already know where you'll be that day. The rest of you are free to judge for yourselves; if you think potentially funny performances from Azaria and Harris can outweigh the generic badness we see everywhere else in the trailer, let me know in the comments.
