Jonathan Swift’s mid-eighteenth century satirical travelogue gets the modern-day make-over in this Jack Black vehicle, in which he plays a slacker who gets transported to a magical land of little people and learns large life lessons along the way. Gone are the social allegories as well as most of the locations Swift’s Gulliver travels, replaced instead with a sub-standard insecurities-overcome story steeped in contemporary sarcasm and ironic, already dated, anachronisms. In fact, Rob Letterman, director of conspicuously not-Pixar fare such as Shark Tale and Monsters Vs. Aliens, seems to have opted for the most rudimentary resemblance to the source material, namely, its title and the Liliputs.
As Lemuel Gulliver (they trade the satire for pee jokes but keep the name Lemuel?!) it’s hard to blame Black for the film’s many shortcomings. His rock ‘n’ roll slacker spaz is so unpretentiously goofy and kind-hearted as to render him immune to laws of the one-trick-pony, whether he be a rock music teacher, a caveman turned chosen one or the giant savior of the city of Liliput. As he goes from vilified giant to adored protector, it’s the insufferable Yankee in King Arthur’s Court gags that threaten to sink this already questionable adaptation to Friedberg and Seltzer levels. What could be funnier than tiny Medieval people fist-bumping, re-enacting Star Wars and Titanic, or building a giant transformer/iron man, you ask? Quite a lot, really.
Not lacking for talent, Gulliver’s Travels squanders what could have made for as yet unexplored comedic combinations. Billy Connolly, Jason Segel, and “The IT Crowd”’s Chris O’Dowd all underwhelm as small players in a boilerplate love triangle with Emily Blunt’s bland princess at its center. In the place of humor, the residents of Liliput adopt the sassy giant’s awkwardly self-referential colloquialisms of the post-millennial age, natch.
After all quarrels are quelled, lessons learned, matches made, and problems in general resolved, we are treated to the one moral message we couldn’t possibly have seen coming, a Black-led flash-mob performance of Edwin Star’s “War (What Is It Good For),” finally proving that the key to peace between two warring nations is a giant who can easily destroy them all.
