Jack Black in Gulliver is this 2010s reimagining of the classic 1726 story from Jonathan Swift. In the same era in which Jack Black was Nacho Libre and did School of Rock, he plays the same version of himself that he usually does. This isn’t a criticism though as Jack Black being Jack Black pretty much carries this whole movie.
The story focusses on a modern day setting of Gulliver being a mail room guy in an office who realises his life is going nowhere. A new hire is immediately promoted above him and he’s still too nervous to ask out Darcy, his love interest after five years of working in the same office.
This leads to a lie that he is a talented travel writer and is then sent to cover a story about the Bermuda Triangle. It’s funny that when watching this it struck me how much the Bermuda Triangle used to be talked about and referenced as this near wonder of the world when I was a kid, but the intrigue in this phenomenon seems to have mostly died down in recent years.
The Triangle is an area in the ocean where a usual number of boat accidents and plane crashes have happened and in the movie it’s interpreted as a strange tornado like whirlpool. For some reason Gulliver is sent off in a smallish boat alone and upon crashing into the whirlpool he wakes to find himself in Lilliput.
Lilliput is a civilisation where everyone is tiny compared to Gulliver and as has been made famous in all versions of the story, Gulliver finds himself strapped down and so tired by the tiny nation. He soon breaks free and meets a royal family who like the original book are mostly as you’d expect to find in the 1700s. Billy Connolly and Catherine Tate play the Queen and Emily Blunt plays a Princess.
The antagonist of the film is Sir Edward Edwardian played by Chris O’Dowd who doesn’t quite convince as a credible villain. The balance of the role of humour and likeable villain never quite hits which is a shame as he’s a likeable actor.
This being a film from 2010 it’s weird to see the cast also has James Cordon in a relatively minor role as a king’s aid. It’s a shame that there isn’t a film with both Black and Cordon playing off each other as they’ve both made a career as playable the loveable comedy fat bloke. But this may be the only movie they share screen time in.
The film focuses almost entirely on Gulliver in Lilliput and only briefly has him arrive in Brobdingnag where Gulliver is now teeny tiny and the other humans there are giants. This section only has Gulliver captured by a little girl who only grunts and treats him as a little girl’s dolly. After a few minutes he returns to Lilliput to again battle with Edwardian and soon comes to a close.
The film is let down by its need to clumsily include modern references into the plot of Gulliver’s Travels where it didn’t need them and they’re not well done. The idea of having someone go to a different land or back in time and take credit for inventions they didn’t come up with is usually fun, but having the town in Lilliput made to look like Times Square in New York complete with Jack Black’s face being on the poster for the musical Wicked makes no sense. Him also getting a bunch of Lilliputian’s dressed as Kiss so he can in some way pretend to play Guitar Hero is just silly.
The biggest let down in this respect is Edwardian seeing a magazine article that Gulliver had with him on the boat and learning to build a giant robot was terrible. The idea that the Lilliputian’s could have interpreted something from a magazine and build a giant robot that could fight and defeat Gulliver was nonsense. There could have been other ways to defeat and cause issues for Gulliver than this without it seeming so implausible. And keep in mind I’m saying this seemed implausible in the world of Gulliver’s Travels.
Conclusion
It’s not a bad film and falls into the Sunday afternoon film category. Nice to have on in the background when you’re only half paying attention. Jack Black plays himself and with a good cast of comedic actors around him, who equally have little to work with from the script manage to pull off a fun enough film.
