'Gulliver's Travels' isn't big on cinematic style

Gulliver's Travels plays to a few of Jack Black's strengths -- his physicality, his musicality, his eyebrows. But even at 83 minutes (plus a three-minute cartoon starring the Ice Age squirrel), it's a drag, another 3-D movie for kids in which the 3-D adds nothing, merely subtracting from parents' wallets. What's most surprising about this version of a big man among Lilliputians is how little film technology has improved, over 115 years of cinema, in the art of putting that life-size person in that teeny, tiny world.

Black plays Lemuel Gulliver, a lonely Star Wars-obsessed loser, stuck 10 years in the mailroom at a publishing house. When he finally gets up the nerve to ask out travel editor Darcy (Amanda Peet), he backs himself into an assignment. Yeah, he's a writer. Yeah, he's traveled.

A little Internet cut-and-paste plagiarism gives him credibility, and she's convinced he's the right guy to send on a "Bermuda Triangle" travel story. And that's when his rented trawler is sucked into a whirlpool and dropped, with Gulliver, in a land of English-accented Lilliputians ruled by Billy Connolly, with Emily Blunt as a prissy princess and Chris O'Dowd as the arrogant Gen. Edward Edwardian, suitor to the princess.

Alas, poor Horatio (Jason Segel) is but a commoner, lacking the pedigree or "act of valor" to make him worthy to pursue that same princess.

Gulliver copes with Lilliput the way he coped with his real life: with exaggeration. On his island, Manhattan, he was president -- "President the Awesome." And after he bails Lilliput out of a conflict with rival state Blefescu, all things Gulliver become cool in Lilliput.

But sooner or later, the lies will be revealed and Gulliver will have his Lilliput-up-or-shut-up moment.

Jonathan Swift's classic satire long ago lost the satiric sting it packed in the 18th century. The moral of the story now seems to be, "I'm a big shot for the first time in my life."

Rob Letterman's film manages a few cute moments, but when your big laugh is how a big guy with fully functioning kidneys might put out a little bitty fire, well ... Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel