Jonathan Swift probably never dreamed of the consumer excess that would elbow its way into the great satire of Gulliver's Travels all these centuries later. No doubt he'd have been keen on poking fun at this new world - Swift had a fascination with human failings of the most base sort - but I don't think a three-storey Coke can that's washed up on the shores of Lilliput with all the other debris in the latest film adaptation is what he'd have in mind.
Other than product placement opportunities, that debris would primarily be Jack Black, who stars as a travel writer on assignment in the Bermuda Triangle, shipwrecked by a storm, then trussed up and tied down by tiny folk like all the Gullivers before him. With director Rob Letterman staying Swift's course, our intrepid traveller's incarceration is followed by trust, friendship and finally understanding as everyone tries to answer that age-old question: Does size matter? Since this is a modern-day telling, the modern world intrudes from beginning to end, and in 3-D. Before landing on Lilliput, Gulliver was at the bottom of a Manhattan publishing giant's ladder, the mailroom guy with a hopeless crush on Amanda Peet's smart, successful beauty with a corner office and travel assignments to dole out. Then comes the storm, the wreck and suddenly Gulliver finds he is the giant among men. Back home, he tells the little Lilliputians, people call him President the Awesome. So he's got some emotional growing up to do. Awesome. Well it is and it isn't.
Black has the kind of cheeky comic sensibility that should have perfectly suited Gulliver - a straight man if there ever was one with an eye for the absurd. But Black's brio is off - too much here, too little there, only occasionally right. In the Shrek tradition, screenwriters Joe Stillman and Nicholas Stoller have packed Gulliver's stem to stern with pop culture references. Bermuda Triangle, love triangles, Transformers, Yoda, Titanic, KISS (as in the band) and Times Square, to name but a few. But this story is not just about Gulliver. It is about the closed society of Lilliput and the machinations that go on behind those high walls.
This Lilliput is modelled even more lightly than Swift's was on a not-jolly-old-England with its royalty and country bumpkins, rules and warring kingdoms. Emily Blunt, who proved such prickly fun in The Devil Wears Prada, is the tastiest small fry in this town. As Princess Mary, she is the object of affection for commoner Horatio (Jason Segel) but is already engaged to a pompous twit of a general played with sublime superiority by Chris O'Dowd.
Production designer Gavin Bocquet deserves a shout-out for making the big and the small so compatible and yet so distinct. Though the really amazing feat had to be shrinking all those actors down to pint size for the duration of the shoot, unless of course it was the keen eye of director of photography David Tattersall playing some very cool visual tricks on us. Gulliver's Travels is one of those movies that falls between complete disaster and loads of fun.
Cast: Jack Black, Amanda Peet, Emily Blunt and Jason SegelDirector: Rob LettermanRating: GView the original article here
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