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Gulliver's Travels

Josh Spiegel: This movie looks like a parody of bad movies starring comedians. It's like the fake movies that Adam Sandler "starred" in during Funny People. Jack Black, Billy Connolly, Jason Segel are all funny and talented, but this just looks so lame and cheap and stupid. No thanks.

Brett Beach: Wow. This looks jaw-droppingly terrible. If you are going to update a classic work of literature, it's important to have a point of view and a reason why. The Night at the Museum reference indicates the level of thinking that went into this project: find comedian, insert into family-friendly story with literary associations, let jokes write themselves. I can understand this thematically as a followup for Rob Letterman to Monsters vs. Aliens, but co-writer Nicholas Stoller has either lost the funny or they purposefully didn't use any funny jokes in this preview. This is one of my favorite books and if this trailer is any indication, the Ted Danson NBC miniseries from the '90s will remain definitive (if you have never seen it, get thee to a video store or Netflix).

Kim Hollis: Everything Brett says is right. I'm blown away at how awful this looks - and I'm generally okay with saying I like Jack Black. I was amused when the winners of Survivor's reward challenge this past week got to see this movie as their prize, and one of the contestants hemmed and hawed about how Gulliver faces adversity just like he is facing adversity there in Nicaragua - but never said that he liked the movie itself. This might surprise me (I thought Night at the Museum looked bad, too), but Gulliver's Travels looks like an unfunny, not-entertaining abomination.

David Mumpower: I was amused to see the notation that this is from the producers of Night at the Museum because it seems like they took an idea from one segment of that film and made an entire feature out of it. Other than that, Gulliver’s Travels seems like a heapin’ helpin’ of Jack Black shtick, which means that it could be very good or very Year One. I laughed at a few spots in the trailer, something I didn’t do for Year One. So, I’m holding out hope for the project but I understand everyone else’s reticence to do so. Year One was an unforgivable film, undoing any of the goodwill Black had earned with Kung Fu Panda.

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