Reviews: I Know What You Smurf-ed Last Eddington

This weekend’s three wide-release newbies (‘Smurfs,’ ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer,’ and ‘Eddington’) certainly qualify as “variety at the multiplex.”

New Smurfs toon prioritizes entertaining young kids over pandering to their nostalgic parents.

It’s a strange thing to praise what’s not in a movie, especially when it comes to kids’ films. After all, both then and now, kids’ films are often judged — in terms of parents treating a review like Consumer Reports — not by their good qualities but by whether they include anything that might offend their delicate sensibilities and/or frighten or depress their kids. Paramount’s Smurfs has little that would upset, terrify, or otherwise disturb young viewers. It’s another PG-rated example of “What the hell does an animated movie have to do to get a G rating?”

More importantly, Smurfs contains almost zero pop culture references. It offers in its brisk 90-minute runtime few attempts to pander to adults via “edgy, but not really” humor, although the rare examples of such are somewhat amusing. There is no reason for any adult to attend sans kids in tow. However, nor will Smurfs make captive parental moviegoers beg for the sweet release of death.

Despite a promotional campaign that made this 2025 Smurfs movie look like a remake of the 2011 Smurfs movie, it’s… not that. Yes, adventure and peril eventually lead our animated blue heroes into the real world. Yet this isn’t another case of Smurfs hanging out in the big city, bonding with humans and/or using the word “Smurf” as a substitute for actual humor.

That’s not to say that it’s a boldly original narrative. Papa Smurf (John Goodman) gets kidnapped by Razamel, the also evil wizard brother of Gargamel (both voiced by JP Karliak), and Smurfette (Rihanna, continuing the trend of pop stars voicing the lone female Smurf in Smurf Village) leads her blue buddies on an interdimensional adventure to get him back. We meet Papa’s estranged brother, Ken (Nick Offerman), and learn some origin story nonsense about magic books, while No-Named Smurf (James Corden) has an identity crisis.

As I wrote back in September amid my “This is shockingly good, actually!” Transformers One rave, Paramount is making the best kid-focused biggies in Hollywood. Yes, the likes of Clifford, Sonic the Hedgehog, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and (relatively speaking) the Paw Patrol movies are IP plays. However, they generally prioritize being well-made, thoughtful, and entertaining big-screen entertainment *for kids* first and for nostalgic adults second.

Directed by Chris Miller (who helmed the first Puss in Boots) and penned by Pam Brady (who co-wrote Team America and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut), Smurfs continues that relatively positive trend. While not arguing that Smurfs is remotely exceptional, it doesn’t try to be anything it’s not. It’s still IP for IP’s sake, and — noting periodically creative animation and occasionally clever wordplay — I’m not arguing that it’s “good.” If your younger kids want to check it out, you might find it exactly entertaining enough.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is a nostalgia tour through a movie that you’ve already seen.

The movie I Know What You Did Last Summer most reminded me of was Patrick Wilson and Scott Teems’s Insidious: The Red Door. That quasi-legacy sequel begins with Josh Lambert having repressed his memories of the first two installments and spending much of the runtime investigating and/or uncovering the very events detailed in 2011 and 2013. It works better as a family melodrama than as a supernatural thriller, but I still enjoyed it. However, it’s a rare such continuation that’s probably more present-tense compelling if you haven’t seen, or barely remember, Insidious and Insidious: Chapter 2.

I cannot say how this hardcore nostalgia-filled wankery would play to those who haven’t seen the 1997 adaptation of Lois Duncan’s 1973 YA beach read. That’s because it is mainly 112 minutes of young adults investigating the plot of the very movie that most of its core audience will already have seen. Once we get the expected set-up and the hooks start hooking, our new batch of imperiled young adults (Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers and Sarah Pidgeon) essentially go all Scooby Doo and investigate the somewhat similar events that took place in 1997.

Much of the middle 75 minutes is spent watching the “kids” (all played by adults aged 27-30) discover the plot of the original I Know What You Did Last Summer. That includes Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. doing their best “It’s true. All of it, it’s all true!” to presumingly applauding 35-55-year-olds while today’s teens roll their eyes. Three positives: The mystery and climactic reveal make more sense this time around. The film portrays its presumed “final girl” as an active bisexual sans fanfare. It utilizes modern, youth-skewing rock/pop songs on the soundtrack.

Sans IP, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s stylishly directed and occasionally suspenseful slasher flick — there are a few solid R-rated kills — probably would have “worked” if it were a straight-up reboot rather than a legacy sequel. The “this happened before” problems start right from the get-go, as (slight first-reel spoilers) the kids don’t actually commit a murder. One of the participants stands in the middle of the road, only for a car to swerve and plunge into the icy waters below. Once again, protagonists in 2025 aren’t allowed to be as shady as those in 1997.

The terrified teens even do their damnedest to prevent the imperiled vehicle from tipping over the cliff and — since there’s no plausible way for them to safely climb down to the crash site on the off-chance that the driver is still alive — call the police before fleeing. That may be a fun law school question in terms of comparative culpability, and, arguably, anyone who knew the doomed driver had moral cause to do sweet and/or vicious revenge. However, the alteration removes much of the guilt and legal peril of the original high concept.

It thus removes much of the shading from our otherwise painfully generic and barely sketched-out new protagonists. Ditto the notion of reframing Southport as a Derry-like town with a macro-sized level of corruption and resulting moral decay. Yes, this is another attempt to reframe what was once a random, youth-skewing, high-concept studio programmer (one that wasn’t even good in the first place) as a now borderline biblical text. I’m expecting a reverent, “What we did back then matters, dammit!” Police Academy sequel. That one already has suitably heroic theme music courtesy of the late Robert Folk.

Warts and all, Scream V A) introduced entertaining protagonists who could anchor the franchise and B) had something to say about arrested development nostalgia in an era of pandering legacy revivals. That’s just one reason why I am so bitter about how that franchise imploded (to say nothing of why). This is just wankery for wankery’s sake. In ways both expected and not, I Know What You Did Last Summer feels like the rock bottom culmination of everything I warned about ten years ago upon exiting Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It was true. All of it, it was all true.

Eddington is the movie we needed two years ago.

Ari Aster’s sprawling, 149-minute, intentionally overlong modern-day western is a pretty strong example of the current dilemma in terms of what we want/need from our mainstream entertainment. It is not a period piece meant to reflect our current reality, while offering pandering comfort to those who want to assure themselves that they would have been one of the good ones. Nor is it a big-budget adventure film that tells a story reflecting on the moment in time while shrouded in comforting fantasy elements and metaphorical allegories. Set in the summer of 2020, A24’s Eddington is very much about the recent past and how the global COVID-19 pandemic pitted neighbor against neighbor, providing the catalyst that allowed many to devolve from political indifference to outright fanaticism.

Aside from the first act of Craig Gillespie’s “Gamestop Saga” flick Dumb Money, which focused on COVID-era shellshock, Eddington is among the few mainstream films to explicitly acknowledge the hellish circumstances of the early 2020s and how they allowed bad actors to make a bad political and cultural situation even worse. However, it’s 2025, and the bad guys won. What value is there in watching oafish conservatives rage about wearing facemasks while well-meaning but patronizing white teens center the latest chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement around their own virtue? Without arguing that movies can change the world or make a macro-sized difference, a film like Eddington might have been more useful *before* a nationwide PTSD-caused amnesia contributed to our current political hellscape.

That’s not to say Eddington is a bad movie, or even an unentertaining one. While lacking the hallucinatory madness and stylized chaos of Beau is Afraid (his masterpiece, at least thus far), this is still a lively and sprightly bit of “personal is political” folktelling that uses a local election and resultant small-town melodrama as a microcosm for an America being torn apart by forces well outside our purview. The plot begins simply enough, with longtime sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, doing terrific-as-usual work in a challenging role) waging electoral war against Eddington’s incumbent Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, in a smaller but no less crucial role) that’s less about party affiliation and more to what extent nationwide pandemic protocols should impact a mostly COVID-free small town.

To say much more than that, at least in terms of story and plot, would do the film a disservice. However, I’ll note the against-type work from Michael Ward as the lone representative of Black law enforcement dealing with varying sorts of condescension from initially well-meaning colleagues. Ditto Emma Stone as Joe’s dispirited spouse drifting into a different kind of extremism, as well as Austin Butler briefly appearing as a charismatic cult leader. The picture becomes slightly more genre-focused as it progresses, flirting with outright absurdity while retaining its of-the-moment topicality and not letting any of its less idealized characters off the moral hook. Simplistically speaking, it begins as a real-world examination of 2020s America before arguably becoming what America probably looks like from the outside.

Art and entertainment aside, is there any value in a film like Eddington, arriving at least a year too late? To be fair, it’s closer to the as-it-happens urgency of Superman (which also might have been more “useful” in summer 2024) and the second season of 24 (airing in 2002/2003) than the slew of late-2000s and early 2010s films (The Dark Knight, Avatar, Iron Man, Prince of Persia, Robin Hood, etc.) that — varying quality notwithstanding — took their sweet time criticizing the post-9/11 security state and/or the 2003/2004 Iraq war. If anything, it’s more “enjoyable” when viewed outside of its topicality. Eddington may not be the movie we need right now, but it’s closer to what we say we want from our popcorn entertainment.