Gulliver’s Travels (2010)

(In French, On TV, June 2020) It’s a tale as old as time—no, not Swift’s book of adventures, but the concept of repurposing cultural touchstones as a showcase for an actor’s specific brand of comic mugging. So it is that in this take on Gulliver’s Travels, the first half of an eighteenth-century novel becomes an excuse for Black’s rock-and-roll-and-crude-jokes, with something like an hour of the film dedicated to various size jokes regarding Lilliput, and Black playing the ingrate false hero. Forgettable despite being crammed with wall-to-wall special effects, Gulliver’s Travels is a comedy solely by virtue of not being tragic, not due to having any effective humour. The biggest joke here may be that Emily Blunt had to pass on becoming the MCU’s Black Window because she was contractually forced to be in this immediately forgettable film.