Gargamel won't kill The Smurfs before I do

The Smurfs (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Raja Gosnell. Starring Hank Azaria, Neil Patrick Harris, Jonathan Winters.

The director of Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Big Momma's House continues his quest for the title of history's greatest monster.

The Smurfs is a film with no redeeming qualities, except perhaps that it isn't Marmaduke. This is not a good movie, nor was it supposed to be. No one who approves a script with Smurfs rapping the Smurf song has dreams of making a good movie. This is the work of someone happy to produce something that makes the world just a little bit worse than it was before: a film that leaves the kids walking out from it ever-so-slightly dumber than they were going in.

The jokes are groan-worthy almost without exception. The characters are stolen wholesale from other terrible kids' movies. The heart-to-heart moments are so insipid that they could only have been written by psychopaths struggling to replicate human emotion.

The Smurfs begins in peaceful Smurf Village, but because this setting doesn't provide many opportunities for lame pop culture references or gratuitous product placement, the action soon moves to modern-day New York City, where a core group of Smurfs hangs out with Neil Patrick Harris and Jayma Mays. They are chased there by Gargamel (Hank Azaria), a sorcerer who wants to harvest the Smurfs for their magical smurfy essence.

Now, granted, Gargamel is evil, but I think we ought to hear him out. He makes a strong case. We are shown that a single drop of this Smurf extract can restore the youth of a 60-year-old woman (the subject of one quickly forgotten subplot) or shoot a really cool death ray from a magic wand. It can probably do other things, too. I don't care.

The point is that a bit of sweat or a single whisker from Papa Smurf's beard is enough to produce a decent supply of this stuff, and the Smurfs won't share. Can we really blame Gargamel for asking the Smurfs to spare a bit of hair and dandruff that would be going down the drain anyway? These little cretins could improve the world in immeasurable ways at no cost to themselves, and they choose not to.

They're also incredibly irritating-especially the one voiced by George Lopez. That makes it a win for everyone if Gargamel catches them in a big dirty net and squeezes them through a garlic press.

And when that's done, maybe we could sauté them in some white wine and butter and enjoy some Smurf scampi. Look, I'm just throwing that out there.

Rated PG for unfair depictions of evil sorcerers.

1.5 out of 5

One Day (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Lone Scherfig. Starring Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess and Patricia Clarkson.

An adaptation of a David Nicholls novel that mistakes length for content and tragedy for meaning.

Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) are two University of Edinburgh graduates who start a friendship in 1988 after an abandoned attempt at a one-night stand. One Day checks in with them regularly over the next 20 years as Emma grows from awkward to self-assured and Dexter's easygoing confidence falls apart under the weight of his personal issues.

Miraculously, neither of them ages during this time, but that's because of the makeup budget, not the plot.

Once the pieces are set, it becomes clear that we're in for 20 years of time killing while Dexter and Emma wait for the appropriate moment to get together. When that's resolved and time still remains on the clock, the next development is just as obvious.

Anne Hathaway is charming, of course, but that doesn't make Emma a good character. Dexter, I suppose, is meant to be endearingly flawed, but he comes off as straight-up obnoxious. The chemistry between them is missing. The emotional content is assumed rather than earned. There is nothing here that hasn't been done better and much more efficiently in a thousand less tedious love stories.

Predictable, manipulative, and pointless, it's a romantic comedy minus the comedy.

Rated PG-13 for violence against British accents.

2.5 out of 5