What the Smurf are we doing here?

The Smurfs movies from over a decade ago finally learned to stay in their own animated world after three films, discarding their Alvin And The Chipmunks-style forays into live-action in favor of something suitably smaller-scale. But the Smurfs series came to a close just as Trolls was establishing a new sugar-rushed, pop-scored paradigm for outdated IP adaptations. So now, nearly a decade after that film came out, the Smurfs are back. Their new movie is both a knock-off of the lucrative musical from DreamWorks (which is where Smurfs director Chris Miller worked for most of his career) and of the lapsed trend of multiversal superhero fare. Caught between its cynical approaches to bygone zeitgeists, Smurfs can’t decide how it wants to sell out.

While directed by Miller and written by Pam Brady (whose credits alternate between South Park projects and kiddie fare), it’s Rihanna that emerges as the true auteur of Smurfs. Replacing Katy Perry and Demi Lovato in the pop-star-as-Smurfette role, Rihanna is the lead actor, producer (alongside her manager Jay Brown, and Roc Nation co-founder Ty Ty Smith), and contributor of original music. If any musical artist deserved an easy check for making dance-pop that copy-pasted cartoon character models could perform rote choreography to, it’d be Rihanna—at least, as opposed to Justin Timberlake.

But despite Rihanna’s prominence in the film, and its former production title of The Smurfs Musical, Smurfs can’t enjoy the simplicity that comes from being derivative of just one thing. Amid a cloying “I Want” song from James Corden, generic music-video sequences, and Rihanna needledrops, the film must needlessly complicate the quest of No Name Smurf (Corden) to figure out his “thing” through song. (“Carpool Karaoke Smurf” was taken, apparently.) To that end, Brady latches onto another concept that was floating around Hollywood about a decade ago: A team of heroes protecting the multiverse from villains who want to assemble a collection of magical color-coded MacGuffins.

The evil wizard Gargamel’s evil wizard brother Razamel (both voiced by JP Karliak) seeks to find and antagonize the Smurfs not just for hatred’s sake, but for a larger prize: a lost magical tome in a set of four, which grants control over the multiverse when wielded together. One of these infinity books has long been hidden in Smurf Village by Papa Smurf (John Goodman) and his brother Ken (Nick Offerman, who doesn’t play Uncle Smurf, but whose Smurf has a regular human name for undisclosed reasons). There’s another normally-named Smurf out there, Ron (Kurt Russell), who has a Thor-like mane of blond hair and a Captain America-style shield. Again, his name is not Ron Smurf, but just Ron. These three escort Smurfs to its superhero showdown finale, where the “Guardianeers Of Good” face down the dark magicians.