Gulliver's Travels is a comedy starring Jack Black, Amanda Peet, Jason Segel, Chris O'Dowd, T.J. Miller, Emily Blunt, Billy Connolly, and Catherine Tate. It came out in the 90s...wait, what? It came out in 2010?! Well, it feels like it came out in the 90s. Anyway, the movie is (very) loose adaptation of Jonathan Swift's work, but we'll talk about that in a bit.
So! Lemuel Gulliver (Black) is a schlubby but apparently content mail room clerk for a publishing house who's been crushing on his coworker Darcy (Peet) for years, but is too chicken to ask her out. His new hire (Miller) gets promoted past him in a single day and tells him that as long as he thinks small, he'll always be small. This is officially as subtle as this movie ever gets.
So in an attempt to impress Darcy, Gulliver plagiarizes a bunch of travel writing and gets sent on an assignment to Bermuda, falls asleep, falls into a whirlpool, and winds up in Lilliput, where everyone is only a few inches tall. He pees on the burning palace to save the king (which is in the book, but that's basically where the similarities end), and is promoted to protector and mascot. Gulliver claims that he's the hero of just about every movie ever made, Lilliput is remade in the image of New York, Gulliver claims to be the president of his land, blah blah blah.
But the former general of the Lillputian army, Edward (O'Dowd, just doin' his best) betrays the country and has the sworn enemy of Lilliput, Blefuscia, defeating him with a robot they built from a Guitar Hero manual. Anyway, Darcy herself has fallen into Lilliput, so she gets to be the motivation for Gulliver to rise up and fight the robot. Oh, and there's a brief diversion to Gulliver getting to the Island Where We Dare Not Go (Brobdingnag, but it's never identified as such) and getting to be a doll in a giant girl's dollhouse, but that's just there to be his Abyss moment in the Hero's Journey. He defeats Edward, stops the war between Lilliput and Brefuscia with an impromptu musical number ("War"), and then goes home with Darcy and actually does become a travel writer.
OK. So, this movie is really, really bad on a number of levels, and really mediocre on a number of others. I said before it feels very 90s. Jack Black is trying very hard to be 1994 Jim Carrey, just kind of acting goofy and making faces, but the problem is that Jim Carrey is a more gifted physical comedian and he generally had some kind of consistent (if annoying) character. What's Gulliver's deal? Is he lazy but generally happy? Is he ambitious but stupid? Is he good-hearted but naive? When he gives romance advice to the hapless, lovelorn Horatio (Segel) trying to woo Princess Mary (Blunt, who apparently missed out on playing Black Widow because of this movie, which is just criminal), he does OK at first, but then just has him quote "Kiss", but then tells him to act like an aloof jerk, which Gulliver knows doesn't work because he tried it with Darcy and it got him nowhere.
Quite apart from Gulliver not really having much character (he has an arc, kind of, but again, it's just the Hero's Journey by the numbers), the Lilliputians have this quasi-Victorian England thing going on, but there's no statement or satire or even parody here. It's just an American screenwriter writing down "funny" shit that reminds him of England, and poor Billy Connolly and Catherine Tate trying to struggle through making it actually work.
Jonathan Swift's novel was, of course, satire. Gulliver went through several different adventures with different fantastical civilizations, each one skewering something from Swift's experience. You could do a very smart update of Gulliver's Travels wherein a modern American visits Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and the rest of it and sees parallels to his own life blown out of proportion, I think what happened here is that someone knew that in Gulliver's Travels, a guy goes to a place within tiny people and gets tied to the ground, learned that he also gets to piss to put out a fire, and put in a call to Jack Black's people without ever reading any part of it.
My Grade: D-
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT
Next up: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
No comments:
Post a Comment