Gulliver's Travels film poster
When I first watched the trailer for Gulliver's Travels a month or two back, I had no intention in watching the film. The trailer showcased Jack Black at his most annoying. The jokes had very little promise, the premise seemed unoriginal at best, and I was not interested in watching a flick where a bunch of tiny people play with giant iPhones. Well, needless to say when my family dragged me along to watch the movie with them I was not very enthusiastic. Fortunately, I was more than pleasantly surprised. I have an affinity for Jack Black that I may not be able to fully explain. All I can say is that he makes me laugh. He cracked me up in High Fidelity and once I saw Tenacious D on HBO I was hooked. So, Gulliver's Travels finds Black's Lemuel Gulliver working towards his tenure in the mail room of a newspaper. After a failed attempt at impressing his longtime-crush Darcy (Amanda Peet), Gulliver finds himself on a boat by charting the Atlantic Ocean searching for the Bermuda Triangle. Of course the Triangle does what it does best, and Gulliver is magically whisked away to the island of Liliput and its inhabitants of little people.
The film enters full on Disney territory, but with a PG rating it should be expected and tolerated. Gulliver finds himself and helps save the miniatures from their evil neighbors. The flick is fun and mostly harmless. It was cuter than I expected, and the humor luckily worked for me. Black has no problem hamming it up, and we are subjected to another scene of the chubster dancing and rocking out, this time to KISS. Still, I enjoyed my time in Liliput. If you have kids than you could definitely do worse, like Yogi Bear, and other than Tangled there isn't much for the little ones at the theater this month. If you do happen to see it, let me know what you thought.