'Gulliver's Travels' review: Little goes long way

Like a rare and delicate flower, "Gulliver's Travels" will bloom for one day - Christmas - and then start to fade. It will play as a fairly satisfying and cheerful little movie when buoyed by a packed holiday crowd and the presence of glowing children and happy adults looking forward to a few days off. But on Dec. 26, it won't be nearly as fresh, and by Monday, it will have to rise and fall on its own merits. And that won't exactly be pretty.

So, if you're planning to see it, go Saturday. The holiday spirit just might be enough to give "Gulliver's Travels" the magic it lacks.

It's not bad. It's cute. The 3-D is pretty much wasted - for long stretches it hardly seems in 3-D at all - but everything to do with Gulliver's being a giant among the tiny Lilliputians is handled consistently (no size ratio changes) and seamlessly. Jack Black radiates good nature without pressing his luck, and Amanda Peet is in it, and she's pretty radiant and good-natured herself. Take any movie. Then add Amanda Peet - she always makes it a little better.

(Really. It works with just about any movie. Imagine Amanda Peet in "The Godfather," or in "Some Like It Hot," or in "Citizen Kane." They all get a little bit better. Not a lot, but a little.)

In this loose modern adaptation of the Jonathan Swift classic, Lemuel Gulliver works in the mail room of a major New York newspaper, and he's secretly in love with the travel editor (Peet). To impress her, he bluffs about his supposed travel-writing experience, and so she sends him on a three-week assignment to pilot a boat into the Bermuda triangle to see what he finds. It's just "a little story," she tells him. What a good deal: three weeks, all expenses paid, for a little story. Who said the newspaper business is hurting?

And so he hits a storm and wakes up in Lilliput, where everyone is about 3 or 4 inches high and where the architecture, clothing and government are stuck in the mid-19th century. Gulliver is known as "the Beast" and is kept in chains, until a fire rages and he's able to save the day by putting it out. Not with a hose, exactly. He has to improvise ... Are we on the same page here? The sound you're hearing is Jonathan Swift trying to claw his way out of the grave, just so he can kill himself.

But wait. Come to think of it - something like that's in the original book.

The nice thing about Jack Black onscreen, in addition to his being funny, is that he really does seem to care about people. He's warm. So he's nicely placed as the plainspoken fellow who sees wrongs in Lilliput and wants to right them, including the princess' plans to marry an egotistical oaf instead of a sweet commoner (Jason Segel). As Gulliver, Black listens, thinks and offers advice. He's engaged and engaging.

But somewhere by the middle, the souffle collapses, and the movie becomes sleep-inducing. Gulliver doesn't have much to do in Lilliput, and we notice that before he does. As short as the movie is, the screenwriters have a difficult time coming up with enough incident to hold audience interest, and what they devise for the climax is worse than flat. It's cartoonish in the way of a bad action movie.

Still, here's a little good news to mix with the not-so-good: Playing on the same program with "Gulliver's Travels," as a curtain raiser, is a little cartoon about a squirrel who tries to bury an acorn and ends up changing the face of the earth. The cartoon is brilliant and a cut above even the best of what follows.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle