Why?

They have a beautiful magic world to explore and instead they have both films take place in a city in /our/ world? That worked for 'Enchanted' because it was satire of the average Disney princess film. But it doesn't really work here.

I mean the jokes were pretty bad in the trailer and maybe the cartoon also had it's problems from time to time. But what worked for the cartoon was that magical land where the smurfs live. If they'd tried focusing the films on that other than 'oh look at them running through New York/Paris and getting into weird things' these movies would be so much better.