[5]Family-Faith Film Review: Gulliver’s Travels
By Catholic Office of Film and Broadcasting [6]
Gulliver’s Travels: Mediocre effort attempting to cash in on the elusive comic abilities of Jack Black, who plays a modern riff on the traveler Lemuel Gulliver, hero of Jonathan Swift’s classic 18th-century novel. A lazy mailroom clerk who dreams of becoming a travel writer to impress the editor (Amanda Peet) for whom he has fallen, Gulliver cheats his way to a seaborne assignment, only to find himself transported to Lilliput, a vaguely British island populated by a race of people only 4 inches tall. Although marketed to children and families, director Rob Letterman’s sour, slapped-together project features a flagrantly overplayed gross-out gag and carries a noxiously cynical message: You can plagiarize and lie without penalty and still end up with the girl — and the job — of your dreams. Skewed moral values, graphic scatological humor and some intense action scenes. O — morally offensive. (PG)