GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (Rated PG for mild profanity & action, crude humor):   In case you still think we've not been dumbed down over the past half century, just check what Hollywood has done to Jonathan Swift's great classic.  I don't mean simplifying it, but culling the crudities for which he's in part become noted, then emphasizing them well beyond his preference for subtle asides.  (I'm surprised the writers, Joe Stillman - who fared even less with "Planet 51" - & Nicholas Stoller didn't include the view from below at the rip in G's pants as the little people peered up in astonishment at the size of his privates, nor a few other near obscene incidents also included while briefly among the Brobdingnanians nor the naked Yahoos pooping from the trees on people below;  perhaps they did, but  some judicious editing left them on the cutting room floor.)

There's nothing really wrong when a movie made from a classic is brought up to date, providing it maintains the tone & level of the original - which this movie certainly does not. 

The introduction of new material introduces Gulliver (Jack Black) in modern times, in a slick move  that convinces a travel editor (Amanda Peet) that he's an accomplished writer and is sent by her on a Bermuda assignment. But on the way his boat gets sucked up in a Bermuda Triangle twister, landing for the bulk of the film in Swift's fictional lands.

The special effects are as remarkable as those often used to pump up other second-rate movies, while G. carouses with the Lilliutians and, briefly, with the Brobdingnanians, but it concentrates on the first of Swift's four travels - reduced to the simplest Hollywood-type incidents minus all his descriptive dialogs and subtle social commentaries.  What's left is typical humor of the broadest sense.

Funny?  Well, Black's a truly gifted actor, but here he coasts, with ad libbed lines like, "You're so super cool," relying on the kind of humor (including use of wedgies) we've come to recognize as his "style," the most obvious being the dousing of a fire with a tremendous gushing of urine, then going beyond the origial Swiftian situation to turn the gusher on a nasty general (Chris O'Dowd), dousing him thoroughly.  Haw haw.  The rest of the material right down to the weakest of endings is downright moronic, lazy, and shoddy in its writing.  We don't even get the usual out-takes during the final credits as a desperate device to fool us into thinking how really clever & hilarious the film is. 

Ellen M. Somers' special effects, as I said, are the best thing in this sad remake - but special effects have become so obligatory (to make up for slapdash material) that they become ho-hum while this movie grinds to its lazily created conclusion.  Even with 20th Century Fox's latest episode featuring Scat and his acorn before the film is not worth the time nor price of admission.  Read the book.  (Grade:  D+)