A new trailer for Jack Black’s latest came out today. I’m going to link to it, though I wish I could light it on fire instead.

First of all, when I hear that there’s a movie coming out based on Gulliver’s Travels (a rather funny satire by Jonathan Swift), the first thing I see about it should not be an overlong and unfunny Star Wars joke. Secondly, the Lilliputians should be front and center, not left until the last quarter of the trailer. I can understand that the filmmakers wanted to modernize the story, but Swift didn’t spend a lot of time or thought establishing Gulliver’s life back home and neither should this movie.

So Jack Black has love problems. No duh. He’s Jack Black. So he’s stuck at a dead-end job and his new employee quickly replaces him. Why should I care? More importantly, why is Gulliver’s path to Lilliput spelled out in such extreme detail here instead of in the first act of the movie? Why is this nonsense so unfunny and why is it taking up the first 3/4 of this trailer? But even after he arrives on Lilliput, what do we have to look forward to? It looks to me like we’ve got awful VFX and “jokes” ranging from unfunny (the queen’s reaction to Gulliver) to just plain cruel (that foosball gag at the end).

As much as I’d love to blame Jack Black for this, I just can’t. This is who he is and this is what he does. It’s all he knows how to do. I could be no more angry at him for mugging to the camera and being hyperactive than I could be angry at a petri dish of E. Coli for multiplying and causing food poisoning.

Emily Blunt is also in this movie as the Princess of Lilliput. Fun fact: Blunt was actually Jon Favreau’s first choice to play Black Widow in Iron Man 2. Unfortunately, Fox had a contract on her and invoked it to pull her away from that movie, just to be assholes. The studio execs pulled her away from an ass-kicking role in a $280 million-grossing summer blockbuster… to be in this piece of crap. I can’t help but feel sorry for the girl.

Can someone please tell me who the fuck this movie is for? The humor doesn’t look like anything in a kids’ movie. And if so many adults out there are brain-dead enough to think that any of this is good cinema, then the world is in deeper trouble than I thought.

This abomination is coming in theaters… *cringe* in 3D… this December 22nd. If you absolutely must be anywhere near a theater that day, I beg you to go see Tron: Legacy instead.