Skip to content

Gulliver should have stayed home

The verdict on Jack Black’s mock-rock take on Gulliver’s Travels? Not too Swift.But that’s hardly the point when the Hollywood comedy sausage factory cranks out a kids’ movie loosely based on a classic tale like Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century satire.
D01-gulliver
Jack Black dangles 3-D style over the audience in a movie you’d really rather not see.

Gulliver’s Travels

1 1/2 stars (out of 4)

Rated: PG

The verdict on Jack Black’s mock-rock take on Gulliver’s Travels? Not too Swift.

But that’s hardly the point when the Hollywood comedy sausage factory cranks out a kids’ movie loosely based on a classic tale like Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century satire.

The only two Swiftian plot points usually funny writers Joe Stillman (Shrek, Shrek 2) and Nicholas Stoller (Get Him To The Greek) — who are really slumming here — are devoted to are size issues and the instance where the gigantic Gulliver (Black) whips out his man hose and puts out a palace fire by peeing all over the joint.

Underachieving schlub Gulliver toils in the mailroom at a New York newspaper and aims for bigger things, like winning the heart of the travel editor Darcy (Amanda Peet) in between rounds of Guitar Hero.

He does this by plagiarizing some stories from the web. She’ll see him in a new light, liars being chick magnets.

Impressed, Darcy sends Gulliver on a three-week assignment to uncover some truths about the Bermuda Triangle. His solo voyage piloting a cabin cruiser south is interrupted, Gilligan style, and Gulliver wakes up washed up on a beach, staked down by wee folks called the Lilliputians. Gulliver is huge.

His captors are little. Black spends the next hour reprising most of School of Rock and Nacho Libre. The first butt joke clocks in at the 20-minute mark. The end.

You want to know more?

Usually hilarious Billy Connolly rules the Lilliput kingdom with a complete lack of humour and should fire his agent.

Emily Blunt plays his strong-willed daughter who starts out garbed like a princess but occasionally ends up wearing suburban mall-rat wear, which looks weird in the midst of the high-concept Steampunk look the designers have crafted to distract from the sorry script.

Shunned as a beast and thrown in the dungeon for being too tall — overacting not being a crime in Lilliput — Gulliver hooks up with fellow prisoner and misunderstood Lilliputian Horatio (Jason Segal, using a ridiculously bad British accent) who’s in the slammer for making goo-goo eyes at the princess, to the annoyance of her pencil-necked geek of a boyfriend, Gen. Edward (Chris O’Dowd).

Like Connolly, Segal deserves better that playing second banana to the hammy chubster Black, who bounces around like a deranged kangaroo in board shorts when he’s not arching one eyebrow in his trademark “sardonic Jack” look.

A quick side trip to the land of the giants adds an opportunity for Black to clown around in a pinafore and hair ribbons, which will make kids lose their minds because nothing is funnier when you are five years old than a boy in a dress,

The 3-D does little beyond giving the impression we’re watching the movie through a View-Master, while lightening your wallet by a few extra bucks for a ticket.

A Transformers-inspired robot-vs.-Gulliver fight scene is just plain dumb. Kids will enjoy the rock ’em, sock ’em, but parents should not be dismayed if the only lesson they take away from Gulliver’s Travels is how to give a wedgie.

Linda Barnard is a syndicated movie critic for The Toronto Star.