The film feels rushed and slight at every point. Thanks to inspired clowning by Jack Black and a solid cast that breathes life into an inert story, the movie works as a moderately entertaining children’s movie. Opening domestically on Christmas Day, Gulliver’s Travels should enjoy a brief burst of box-office activity.
The great irony about Jonathan Swift‘s 1726 novel, Gulliver’s Travels, is that librarians and schoolteachers have forever relegated to the shelves of children’s books what is, in fact, a scathing moral satire of the corrupt English society of his time and mankind’s proclivity for irrationality and vice over common sense and virtue. (Mark Twain’s equally savage satire, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, suffers a similar fate.) There is something about the comical idea of a normal-sized human striding through a kingdom of tiny people — an image derived entirely from Gulliver’s first voyage to Lilliput — that consigns his literary masterpiece to the world of elves, trolls and fairy princesses.