Gulliver's Travels

Rob Letterman

The story: Slacker mailroom clerk Lemuel Gulliver (Jack Black) blunders into an assignment which takes him to the mysterious Bermuda Triangle when he tries to ask travel editor Darcy (Amanda Peet) out on a date. He winds up in the kingdom of Lilliput and ends up being the champion of its tiny people, along the way antagonising General Edward (Chris O’Dowd), dispensing advice to Princess Mary (Emily Blunt) and finding a best friend in Horatio (Jason Segel).

Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century satirical novel about human nature gets the dumbed-down, glossed-over Hollywood treatment and the results are hardly out of this world.

There is an overlong exposition which establishes how Gulliver is so undriven that he nurses a crush for five years without doing anything about it. It is supposed to give us a better sense of the man but director Rob Letterman could have just skipped the preliminaries and shipped us off to Lilliput pronto.

Instead, what the opening firmly establishes is that this is a Jack Black film. The roly-poly actor was unexpectedly sweet and funny in School Of Rock (2003), in which he was the quirkily unorthodox teacher to a class of straight-laced kids.

Since then, he seems to be reprising the same persona – lovable loser who eventually wins the day – in film after film, including the animated feature Kung Fu Panda (2008).

It is threatening to turn into schtick.

Things improve a little once Gulliver actually travels. After all, if there is anything crying out for 3-D treatment, it would be the scenes contrasting him with the teeny-weeny Lilliputians.

There are some mildly amusing moments showing how they go about building a house, making coffee for Gulliver and even playing live foosball.

But beyond the oh-isn’t-this-cute visuals, scriptwriters Joe Stillman and Nicholas Stoller have little idea what to do with Gulliver. In fact, he comes across as something of an egotistical megalomaniac as he recreates Times Square with his likeness on all the posters and billboards.

You actually start to feel sorry for the intended villain of the piece, General Edward, played with pompous bluster by Chris O’Dowd.

There are also pop culture references galore from Star Wars (1977) to Titanic (1997) as Gulliver concocts tall tales about his life back in Manhattan but there is nothing particularly fresh or funny in the writing.

The whiff of desperation grows stronger as the film proceeds to rip off Transformers (2007) for the showdown and willy-nilly ends with a big song-and- dance number a la Slumdog Millionaire (2008) minus the charm.

It is as if Gulliver is travelling through parodies of other movies rather than having his own adventures.

(ST)