Gulliver's Travels

2010 comedy

Rating: 8/20 (Emma: 7/20; Abbey: dnf)

Plot: It's Jonathan Swift's classic piece of satire, filmed exactly as he intended it to be filmed. Jack Black, a mail room loser infatuated with the pretty girl on one of the upper floors, tells a few lies, plagiarizes a few lines, and winds up on a boat in the Bermuda Triangle to write a puff piece about his travels. He ends up shipwrecked and in the land of the diminutive Lilliputians. Oh, snap!

Wait a second! I was supposed to watch this in 3D, presumably because a three-dimensional Jack Black is going to be funnier than a boring old two-dimensional one. After a cute little animated opening which tricked me into thinking this would be better than I thought, we get Jack Black doing his Jack Black thang. Ad nauseum. You've got to give the guy a lot of credit--he tries really really hard. He takes material that isn't any good, hoists it upon his shoulders, and trounces across the screen in an attempt to carry it. His act's just gotten old though, and by the time his story in this reaches it's big musical conclusion, he's just become a giant parody of himself. The writers of this (you know, Jonathan Swift et. al.) fit the classic Jack Black pattern: make him really sad, then really loud, then repeat. After a preposterous set-up that is poorly written enough to take it completely out of reality, you get to the fantastical part of the story where some so-so special effects become the star. You get some really lame robot foreshadowing (How to build your own robot? Like that's gonna happen!) and the silliest product placement (a giant cola can) that you'll ever see. This also has to be the high point in Billy Connolly's career--being urinated upon by Jack Black. Connolly is the funniest thing about this movie, by the way, but his role is very small. Pun possibly intended. I liked Chris O'Dowd, too. He plays the villain and does a lot more with poor material than could have been reasonably expected. His character is the villain, but I'm not real sure how anybody's going to end up rooting for Gulliver in this. He lies, he's selfish, he's lazy. He commercializes Lilliput and gives bad advice to Jason Segel. When he's getting that wedgie from the robot (yep, that's the type of movie this is), you're almost rooting for the robot. Scratch that. You are rooting for the robot. At the end of this movie, the characters are trying to introduce a catch word "Boosh!" which I think might be a Cat in the Hat influence. Let me end this with a couple-few positives: 1) The stunt coordinator's name is Stink Fisher. 2) Anybody with a giant Amanda Peet fetish is likely to be satisfied. 3) There are some Lilliputian reenactments of Star Wars and Titanic (the funniest scene from Titanic where Rose tells Jack she'll never let him go and then immediately lets him go) that are kind of cute.