Gulliver's Travels: Critic Reviews

Gulliver's Travels strips the source material down to its recognizable parts and then builds something completely new out of them. Unfortunately, the result is entirely Lilliputian in ambition, even for a children's movie.

I was but seldom inspired to peals of true laughter, though I did relish that part when Mr. Black, confronting a fire raging in the Palace of Lilliput, douses the blaze through heroic use of such means as Nature has provided him.

Truly dire...

As so often, this diluted Gulliver's Travels is presented as if it were a children's story, clearly influenced by similarly defanged versions of Alice In Wonderland.

Kids might enjoy some of Black's wacky antics, but adults will tire of them fast.

I will tell you there's a cast credit for a character described only as "Butt-crack man." Consider yourself warned.

A migraine inducement that you'd think Jack Black had gotten out of his system years ago.

It all feels so lazy and familiar that adults may find themselves hoping Black will start to challenge himself again -- and the more swiftly the better.

What were they thinking? What were they smoking? What were they singing on the way to the bank?

...the traditional problem of big-budget family entertainment arises, where the grown-up jokes are too grown-up for the younger kids in the audience and the jokes for kids are too insipid and simplistic to appeal to grown-ups.

This is live action, and despite the 3-D, it's sorta old-fashioned, not that that's a bad thing.

The cast is enjoyable, with Jason Segel (as Gulliver's lil' pal, Horatio) and Emily Blunt (the local princess) a witty cut above for this sort of thing.

[Black] doesn't have much going for him besides pop-culture references and his own looming girth..

A murderously unfunny rethink of the groundbreaking literary satire.

Some films are phoned in. The staggeringly awful "Gulliver's Travels" was texted.

The film stumbles along a predictable path, and there is an audible wince when Gulliver says, "These little people have grown large in my heart."

A classic ready-made for the era of big-budget 3D spectacle gets the least classy treatment imaginable.

Black was already the world's biggest little kid, and he might be the only actor who could have made this movie such nimble fun. No matter how thin the concept, Black always manages to make it his own.

Even at 83 minutes (plus a three minute cartoon) it's a drag, another 3D movie for kids in which the 3D adds nothing, merely subtracting from parents' wallets.

The verdict on Jack Black's mock-rock take on Gulliver's Travels? Not too Swift.

There is laziness at every turn -- in the writing, in the acting, in the filmmaking. Don't reward these yahoos.

For a novel written nearly 300 years ago by a dour Irish cleric with a mad-on about the material world and a satiric mindset dark enough to flirt with misanthropy, it's amazing how well Gulliver's Travels travels.

The chief sin committed by Gulliver's Travels is not that it's a poor adaptation but that its entertainment value is almost nonexistent.

An effects-driven children's movie enlivened by Jack Black but deadened by over reliance on those effects.