WHETHER ONE is a fan of his or not, most would agree that Jack Black is about as big as he ought to get. The computer effects that make Black vast in the desperately edited Gulliver’s Travels seem like wretched excess.
The framing story has Black as an overage kid in the mailroom of the fictional New York Tribune, with a hopeless crush on the travel editor (Amanda Peet). He cut-and-paste plagiarizes his way into a freelance assignment and ends up lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput, he meets a race of bite-size foreigners who imprison him, until they figure out a way to use his strength to defend them from their bitter enemies.
Subplots include a bromance between Black and a Lilliputian (Jason Segel) with a crush of his own on the kingdom’s princess (Emily Blunt), as well as conflict with a jealous (and unfunny) general, played by Chris O’Dowd.
Parts of the script are reasonably faithful to the book; the look of the buildings is from the Queen Anne era, even if the Lilliputians sport late-Victorian costumes. Nearly straight from Swift is a passage on the here-unnamed island of Brobdingnag; it’s the film’s comedic highlight maybe because Black is temporarily cut down to size. Swift wrote the bit that every 6-year-old will feel has been created expressly for Black’s debonair talents: Gulliver’s gross way of fighting a fire.
Black spins his wheels and shakes his belly, trying to find the laugh lines in the forced, uncomfortable dialogue. By the time the directors haul out a giant robot, it’s clear that the most interesting part of this tale went missing. That is: its importance as a pioneering example of what reactionaries denounce as “moral relativism”; Gulliver’s voyage among giants and dwarves taught him that “undoubtedly philosophers are in the right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.”
Swift’s satire on the stupidity of wars of religion is here just a vague antiwar message. The heavy product placement is shoved in by people blind to the implications of what happens when a cargo-bearing colossus arrives on a small island.
PG; 93 min.
