Rihanna hasn’t released a full studio album in nearly a decade. Any recording artist, even one as beloved and successful as Ms. Robyn Fenty, must contend with the industry shifts that have taken place during a lengthy period away from the grind. Yet Smurfs, at least nominally an animated vehicle for new Rihanna music, still presents a chilling vision of any given pop star’s uncertain future, where significant time off taken to raise a family can result in situations unbecoming of such a storied reputation. This doesn’t refer to voicing the magically engineered token girl Smurfette, mind, as Rihanna does here but, more horrifying, playing second fiddle to James Corden.
Yes, Smurfs represents a timeless pop-star tradition: the cynically enriching bait-and-switch. For months, posters have promised that Rihanna IS Smurfette, with a bold certitude worthy of Zendaya’s iconic turn as Meechee. Viewers will indeed get some Rihanna Is Smurfette from this brightly colored animated reboot of the classic (?) Belgian comics characters. But she’s there mostly to supplement and cheerlead a series of other characters’ heroes journeys, most prominently if not coherently No Name Smurf (Corden). He’s the only poor soul in Smurf Village without an Seven Dwarfs-style adjective-based naming convention based on their personality and role in the community – you know, like grouchy, brainy, or girl. The movie joins No Name as he reaches the end of the thousands-long list of potential titles that could become “his thing,” as the movie keeps saying, with reckless disregard as to whether it will conjure images of a Smurf penis. Smurfette remains encouraging of No Name throughout his crisis; after all, look at all the benefits she’s reaped from confidently embracing the richness of her own identity as The Girl One.
Corden, perhaps wary of his status as a professional nuisance menacing moviegoers and restaurant employees alike, plays things relatively straight as No Name. No, he doesn’t have a single funny line; yes, his deliveries still manage to layer some smarm atop his supposed earnestness; and no, it doesn’t make much sense to have Corden playing a Smurf without an adjective when so many – Irritant Smurf; Unwanted Singing Smurf; Attention-Starved Smurf – pop instantly to mind. But as unwelcome as Corden is in an ostensible Rihanna vehicle, it’s not particularly his fault that the movie he’s in is so desperate to knock off the DreamWorks Trolls series (presumably as payback for making greater hay from the technicolor vomiting up of ’80s-kids junk culture), in which he also featured. Nor is it Rihanna’s fault for wanting to do a movie her kids could enjoy. Who could have guessed that a simple Smurfs reboot would constitute such an unholy mess?
See, No Name’s journey toward Rihanna-assisted self-actualization involves a whole plethora of mythology, of which the best that can be said is that, at times, it does seem authentically Belgian. Over a series of bafflingly frequent and complicated lore-drops, Papa Smurf (John Goodman) reveals that the Smurfs, while not magical beings themselves, have been entrusted with the protection of a magical and sentient book (Amy Sedaris) coveted by a cadre of evil intergalactic wizards. When Razamel (JP Karliak), one such wizard, captures Papa Smurf, Smurfette, No Name, and a bunch of other characters with a handful of lines each must traverse various dimensions to rescue him. Papa also has two different secret brothers, voiced by Nick Offerman and Kurt Russell. It truly feels as if a whiteboard list of casting choices for Papa Smurf couldn’t be narrowed down and someone said, let’s just use all three. Similarly, Razamel is the brother of traditional Smurfs antagonist Gargamel, who also appears here, also voiced by Karliak, offering more redundancy than comic chemistry. Many of the characters and plot points feel like elements of the original comics being crammed into what is, after all, the fifth Smurfs movie overall; it is some manner of accomplishment that they are actually created fresh for this iteration.
Less accomplished is the exposition-packed, universe-hopping, occasionally musical mess that director Chris Miller, screenwriter Pam Brady, and presumably an army of uncredited rewriters and/or executives have landed on. The story keeps changing shape and form, and though the animation – bound to be compared to the Spider-Verse series but more akin to the aesthetics of later-period DreamWorks cartoons like The Bad Guys – is well-suited to that challenge, Smurfs rarely makes its shifts feel like invention. It more closely resembles waffling. Once titled The Smurfs Musical, the movie has wound up with the perfect number of in-story songs to make that feel like an obligatory idea on the edge of discarding. (There are three. Three songs in a movie that’s supposed to be a Rihanna vehicle. And one of them is sung by James Corden.) It also has several sequences where the Smurfs interact with cheap-looking live-action environments, as if produced in a panic when some executive noticed this movie didn’t much resemble the animated/live-action hybrid The Smurfs from 2011, which made a now-astonishing $140 million in the U.S. alone. That could also explain the courting of Rihanna; Katy Perry was Smurfette in that one. Sabrina Carpenter should clear her schedule for 2028. Or change her phone number.
Admittedly, this movie is a little bit better than the 2011 film, mainly because the more comics-inspired Smurfs designs less closely resemble golem-core aesthetics. There’s a section late in the movie where the Smurfs and Razamel tumble through a series of alternate universes depicted through stop-motion clay animation, child-style drawings, and so forth, achieving a pleasant level of cartoon whimsy. Alas, the filmmakers seem genuinely convinced that they’re engaging in multiversal, superhero-style myth-building in between musical numbers and live-action-based interludes. Rihanna Is Smurfette may be able to soothe No Name Smurf, but she wasn’t able to calm the panic with which Smurfs must have been made.
Director: Chris Miller
Writer: Pam Brady
Starring: James Corden, Rihanna, John Goodman, Nick Offerman, JP Karliak, Amy Sedaris, Natasha Lyonne
Release Date: July 18, 2025
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.
