Gulliver's Travels: Review

For months now, every time you went to the cinema you were forced to watch an advert for Orange phones that was also an advert for Gulliver's Travels. Finally the film is here so hopefully we won't have to be inflicted with that unfunny advert again. I can only hope the same for this pathetic excuse of a comedy, and this has managed to elbow its way to the number 3 spot of the worst films of 2010.

Loosely (and I mean loosely) based on Jonathan Swift's classic satire, Jack Black plays Gulliver, a mail room worker for a New York newspaper who has a massive crush on a travel writer. He pretends to write about some of his so-called travels and is given the opportunity to go to Bermuda. On his journey, his boat gets sucked into a whirlpool that catapults him to Lilliput, a land filled with little people, and he is the beast. He is also the only hope they have of saving the land from another island, and a power hungry leader of the Lilliput army.

To be honest with you, the plot doesn't really matter, because this is a Jack Black movie, so we get Jack Black slacking, mugging, dancing and rocking it out. That's where the problem with this movie lies. Jack Black, it can be officially announced, is NOT funny. Sure he was brilliant in High Fidelity and School of Rock was superb. Even Tenacious D are terrific, but we've seen this act so many times it is beyond boring.

There is a terrifically talented cast involved here, all wasted. Jason Segel does a very good job with the English accent while Emily Blunt is always watchable but it looks like these two have wandered into the wrong movie. Billy Connolly, Catherine Tate and James Cordon might well have not even bothered to turn up, their parts are so insignificant and Chris O'Dowd (from The It Crowd) seems to be the only one to give his role the proper attitude and that is to ham things up as much as possible.

So it is left to Black and even he looks bored with the whole thing. The film, as with almost every film out now, is in god-awful 3D and is a complete waste of time. Only the Scrat short before the main feature is worth wearing the glasses and at 3 minutes long, it is far funnier than anything that happens in Gulliver's Travels.

Wondering why it's so bad? When gags involve wedgies, weeing on people and, worse of all, a Lilliput solider almost being crushed by a falling Black, only to be saved by Black enormous bum crack, then you know how basic this film is. Let's not forget the completely pointless and cringe-worthy end musical number, so we can have jack Black singing Edwin Starr's War!

If you haven't had enough of Christmas Turkey, then go see this miserable piece of tripe. Personally, it's not even fit to go into a Turkey curry!