Gulliver’s Travels. Rated PG (mild violence, coarse language and some crude humour). 85 minutes. Directed by Rob Letterman. Screenplay by Joe Stillman and Nicholas Stoller. Based on the novel by Jonathan Swift.
Promised in June 2010 and (after countless delays) finally hitting the screens on Boxing Day (and more 2D than 3D), comes a more fully-stuffed turkey than any that graced dining tables around the world this Christmas.
Loosely based on Jonathan Swift’s much-loved, epic parable of politics, war, humanity and religion comes this regrettable, shambolic mess that chiefly serves to cynically attempt to bolster the career of funny man Jack Black (King Kong, Kung Fu Panda), who is also credited as one of the film’s producers.
Apart from the sequence where Gulliver (Black) awakes to find himself prisoner in the Court of Lilliput (home to people less than six inches high), Letterman (Monsters vs Aliens, Shark Tale), Stillman (Shrek) and Stoller (Get Him to the Greek) – quite astonishingly given the creativity of the source material – find themselves similarly washed-up with nowhere to go. And with rare respite, it’s nowhere with a capital N – especially given how quickly the magic of the ‘little people’ effects wears thin.
Not even the work of four supremely experienced editors – Alan Edward Bell, Maryann Brandon (How to train your dragon), Nicolas De Toth (Die Hard 4) and Dean Zimmerman (Jumper) – can save it. Emily Blunt (Princess Mary), Jason Segel (Horatio), Amanda Peet (Darcy), Catherine Tate (Queen Vera) and Billy Connolly (King Benjamin) act with ever-increasing levels of extreme discomfort and desperation, while Black does his thing – which on this occasion, includes a sequence where Gulliver urinates on a burning Lilliputian palace. Yep, hilarious.
You might forgive the film’s serious shortcomings if you could actually find something to like and enjoy about it. But lovers of the novel will be nothing less than appalled, while everyone else will more than likely feel utterly ripped off. I was both – in equal measure.
This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspaper Group
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