Black plays Gulliver, a man who is at the top of his lowly kingdom that is the mail room for a New York City newspaper. Gulliver also has a huge crush on the paper's Travel Editor, Darcy Silverman (Amanda Peet, 2012), and has for a long time. When he finally decides to ask her to dinner, he once again backs away saying he actually wanted to apply for an open position in her department. After some fancy plagiarism, he gets the job and is sent into the Bermuda Triangle for his first story.
As you might expect, this is where Gulliver's Travels really picks up. Gulliver is tossed about in a major storm and ends up shipwrecked on an island inhabited by people no taller than his ankle. Seen as a threat by the Lilliputian General, Edward (Chris O'Dowd, The IT Crowd, Pirate Radio), he is immediately imprisoned. Here he meets the land's previous tallest person, Horatio (Jason Segel, I Love You, Man, Bad Teacher) who dared to talk to the Lilliputian princess, Mary (Emily Blunt, The Devil Wears Prada).
When the little people's sworn enemy, Blefuscu, sends in a small strike force to burn down the palace, both Gulliver and Horatio step in to save the day and thus win the favor of all of Lilliput, including King Theodore (Billy Connolly, The Boondock Saints) himself. Of course, this is much to General Edward's chagrin.
As Gulliver tells tales of his life on the Island of Manhattan, he bends the truth ... a lot. When someone asks if he is the president of his land, he says he is, and when people ask about his past, he recaps movies like Star Wars and Titanic. Gulliver is even made the general of the Lilliputian army and Edward is demoted to Vice-General. The problem is, the more Gulliver wins over the inhabitants of the tiny land, the more Edward hates him and he eventually decides to do something about it. At this point, I don't want to go to much more into the movie's events so that those who want to watch it can let the story unfold as the filmmakers intended.
What I found really odd was that it seems like the same filmmakers got to the end of their script and suddenly decided they wanted to relay a message along with the comedy. At the very end of the film, Gulliver's Travels breaks out into a Bollywood-like song-and-dance number to the tune of Edwin Star's 1969 protest song "War." It just feels really out of place.
That being said, that song and most of the movie sounds really good and takes advantage of surround sound system you might have set up. Accompanying that is the high quality visuals that look great on Blu-ray. While at first glance, Gulliver's Travels might not seem like a movie worthy of high definition video, when you consider the amount of visual effects involved in blending super-sized Jack Black in with the tiny characters, the fact that the movie looks good even under the scruples of HDTV means something.
As for special features, a substantial amount of the Blu-ray's extras are devoted to the technology that went into blending Black into the rest of the cast. Featurettes like "Little and Large" and "Jack Black Thinks Big" go into a lot of discussion about how the crew had to use computer-controlled cameras moving at the proper speeds in both filming sessions (Black's and the Lilliputians') as well as keeping the cast that wasn't even filming on hand in order to read the lines to the person or persons on screen so that you don't get the feeling that the actor is just talking to a blank green screen like you do in so many other movies. The crew even got together a lot of times and did their ad-lib work before going in front of the camera in order to have a better idea of what they were going to say and how they would react ahead of time.
Other special features include the standard fare of gag reels, deleted scenes and even an amusing featurette about how the cast and crew spent their down time goofing off. There is also one on the dance to "War" and a DVD-game where you play Fooseball against the Lilliputians like Gulliver does at one point in the film.
Gulliver's Travels also features an interview with Rob Letterman, Writer and Director of the film, in an always enjoyable show called Life After Film School. These segments have three film-school students get together and interview a director. I've seen these on other DVDs and like I said, they are always good interviews, especially for potential filmmakers.
Like I said at the beginning, Gulliver's Travels is okay. I've seen both better and worse from Black's work. If you are generally a fan of his films, then this is a rental, but I doubt you will want to make it a purchase.
