A nice movie, if you like this sort of thing. I don't.

Rating: Null/10 (21 December 2003)

I was nearly beaten to death by my fanboy film-watching mates as I semi-consciously sighed in desperation after what must have been the fourtieth tear jerking "ending" proved yet again to be a false one and it became evident that I had to endure yet a few more minutes of some imaginary leprechauns babble on about something or other. Because the cliche store had not been completely emptied by the end of this movie (evil guy: "no man can kill me!". (evil guy killed). killer: "I am no man! I am a woman!") during one of the endings a group of smurfs actually literally _sailed off into the sunset_.
As others will no doubt have noticed, it was a neat visual fantasyworld that was cooked up. The battle scenes were neat (although overlong). However, continuity and "innumeracy" problems abound that the fanboys are certainly overlooking, but made the film quite annoying for me. For one, one of the generals carps about having only 6,000 troops. Then, when he goes to attack, his force must have been at least ten times that, at least according to my amateur crowd-control estimates. The size of the on-again off-again brilliant/stupid enemy force also seems to change for dramatic needs. Throughout the movie there are obvious dramatic "shortcuts:" at least two times, the fat irishman climbs a 100m+ cliff or tower in about one second (or rather, in 1 second worth of screen transition). During the climactic battle scene, the enemy encircles the vastly outnumbered "good" force and then waits for no particular reason for what seems like an eternity. There's a lot of this kind of stuff that just doesn't add up.
The characters have little depth--for the most part, they are "good" or "evil." With the exception of one minor character, EVERY good character gets what he or she wants by the end of the movie. I mean, every stinkin one.
This is a fun movie. It's a good movie. But not by any stretch of the imagination is it an IMDB "9.0+" movie. IMDB really has to do something about "grade inflation" for new movies, especially ones that have inherent appeal to internet-type fanboys.
7.0/10 (where "8.0" is about an all-time top-250 movie)