It’s not that we don’t like Jack Black. We do. When he’s on comic form, like in “School of Rock” or “Tropic Thunder,” he tickles our funny bone, and he’s capable of surprising dramatic range when he wants to be. And it’s not that we don’t like writer Nicholas Stoller, who’s proven with the likes of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Get Him To The Greek” that he knows his comedy.
But in a season promising the painful-looking likes of “Burlesque,” “The Next Three Days,” “Yogi Bear” and “Little Fockers,” few films looks to be as wretched as 20th Century Fox’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” The buzz is fairly poisonous, with the usually-pliant Comic Con audience booing the clip they saw, the trailer looks hideous, and the marketing materials, including the new poster that Fandango premiered over the weekend, continue to make the film look like one of the films-within-a-film in “Tropic Thunder” or “Funny People.”
Indeed, there seems to be something of a belief among general audiences that the film is fictional: anecdotally, an advert for the Orange cellphone network currently running before every film shown in the UK, featuring Black (watch it below), has made friends think that the film is a specially-created spoof, rather than an actual release — possibly the definition of “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised: the cast is quite strong, with Jason Segel, Romany Malco, TJ Miller, Catherine Tate, Billy Connolly, Amanda Peet, Emily Blunt and Chris O’Dowd (although Blunt was forced to take the role through contractual obligations to Fox, and we tend to take against anyone that forces our beloved Emily to do anything against her will…). But with “Monsters vs. Aliens” director Rob Letterman in the chair, we wouldn’t count on it. “Gulliver’s Travels” opens December 22nd, when the sound of cash registers ringing will drown out the sound of Jonathan Swift spinning in his grave.
