A giant of a man putting out a fire with his own urine. A giant robot giving that same giant of a man a giant wedgie. A tiny soldier coming face to face with the giant man’s bare ass.
The biggest victim of the 2010 version of Gulliver’s Travels is the viewer, especially those who rushed to the theatre on Christmas Day that year expecting something hilarious only to find themselves subjected to this enduring monument of monstrous stupidity.
Casting Jack Black as Gulliver himself is just the beginning of its many problems. For one thing, it’s not believable that this man lacks confidence, especially around women. In Orange County, Black had no difficulty at all attracting female interest while only in his socks and underwear.
In this modernized version of what is only part one of the epic Jonathan Swift novel, he’s the nerdy mail deliverer at the New York Tribune, all talk no action. Basically, Trump without the spray tan and the trust fund.
He’s clearly in love with Amanda Peet (and quite frankly, with the notable exception of Howard Stern, who isn’t?) but after crushing on her for half the time he’s been working here (it’s been a decade) he still can’t close the deal. Although she doesn’t necessarily give clear signals, she’s friendly whenever she encounters him. It’s not as if he would get a no.
It takes the obnoxious TJ Miller, his newest co-worker who immediately becomes his superior in, what, a single day on the job, to point out he’s a pussy who will never amount to anything. A bummed out Black tries again to no avail but unwittingly gets a chance to become a travel columnist. Peet asks for immediate samples of his writing.
The problem is he can’t come up with anything original. So he cuts and pastes whole paragraphs from other prominent websites and submits them as his own work. Peet recognizes the style but not the plagiarism, at least not right away. Sold on his obvious snow job, she gives Black a terrible assignment. Check out The Bermuda Triangle. Maybe it’s a tourist trap, maybe it’s real. File a report, either way.
And that’s how this Gulliver ends up in Lilliput, an island populated with human beings the size of action figures. Mistaken for Brock Lesnar, despite towering over everyone including the King (Billy Connolly) and his ravishing daughter (Emily Blunt), he remains the Star Wars-obsessed coward he’s always been.
Chris O’Dowd plays Blunt’s controlling fiancé, the head of the tiny man army who correctly pegs Black as a phony and a threat to his power. Thoroughly unimpressed with all the ways he artificially puffs himself up (like all the remade Times Square posters with those weak Gulliver puns, the lies about him being The President of the United States and the staged live recreations of famous movie moments with one of the residents playing him as the hero), in the second half of the film the insecure general deliberately sabotages Lilliput’s defense systems just to see his new foe humiliated by an invading army, a plan inevitably doomed to fail.
So, he goes to Plan B. Finding Black’s magazine he was reading before he got sucked into that whirlpool, O’Dowd makes a deal with that same invading army which results in the creation of that aforementioned robot that finally exposes the hero’s numerous physical shortcomings, although later he delivers a decent Braun Strowman-style dropkick along with an elbow drop or two during their rematch. A bit of a wink to Nacho Libre.
In Manhattan, Black has no friends unless you consider his sad interactions with his Star Wars memorabilia. So the second he encounters pint-sized Jason Segal while they’re both incarcerated, he’s not so lonely anymore. Segal got nabbed for eye flirting with Blunt who clearly likes him back but doesn’t know how to get out of her loveless engagement with the general. Eventually, she pulls off a Constanza but not as humourously.
There’s a thoroughly exhausting running gag involving pop culture references like the scene where Black plays Cyrano to help Segal attempt a Romeo & Juliet-style wooing while also being fed lines from Prince’s Kiss (guess they couldn’t afford the rights to the original song).
Black has no game himself so although Segal’s clowning around with wack dance moves appears to be working he’s later advised to play it cool and act like he’s not interested which of course completely blows up in his face. When Lilliput is occupied, the Princess would rather further endure an unhappy engagement with a man who finds her nothing more than “satisfactory” than escape with Segal. Maybe she saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Meanwhile, a thoroughly pissed off Peet arrives the exact same way as Black, expressing the exact same lines of dialogue upon awakening and even imprisoned in the same place only to completely forget all about her disgust and disappointment once she finally learns the truth about Black whose other deceptions otherwise turn the dopey, isolated citizens of Lilliput against him. Suddenly, all is forgiven especially when the Tenacious D singer is given a chance for redemption, albeit with some last-minute help.
This update of Gulliver’s Travels is what I like to call a Heroic Imposter Movie where the protagonist fools a whole bunch of morons into thinking he’s something special when he’s really a giant nothing, a complete fraud who doesn’t deserve any sympathy. As I said before, Jack Black is the absolute wrong guy to play this role. He has too much charisma to be this pathetic loner lost in his unfulfilled fantasies and stuck in a tiny apartment unable to make a decent cup of coffee.
Despite all the considerable wealth he’s acquired from starring in several blockbusters for more than 20 years, he still comes across as the relatable cool guy who can hang with anyone which is not how he’s portrayed here. His love of pop culture is seen as a barrier to forming real relationships. His uncertainty about what to say to Peet doesn’t translate. It’s bullshit.
Even though the screenplay was clearly written with him in mind, the laughs are not forthcoming. This is his worst performance since The Neverending Story III. He hams it up way too much, especially during the Edwin Starr homage near the end. You’d think as one of the executive producers he would demand some quality control instead of encouraging more and more juvenile antics.
Why does he keep signing on for crap like this? I remember when Black was hilarious on a celebrity edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire a couple of decades ago. In January 2016, when he appeared on Conan O’Brien’s TBS show to promote another terrible film, Kung Fu Panda 3, he correctly predicted a Trump Presidential victory in another memorable TV appearance. I wasn’t a fan of Orange County but he was funny in that, too. What happened? Why did he decide to become the white Eddie Murphy?
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, December 13, 2022
10:19 p.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 