"Gulliver's Travels" Film Opens Christmas Day, 2010

Going to the movies is becoming an increasingly popular way to spend Christmas afternoon. Two new movies that will be playing on Christmas Day 2010, after opening a few days earlier, are Little Fockers with Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro and True Grit, the Coen Brother's remake of the John Wayne classic. Some cities will also be showing Country Strong with Gwyneth Paltrow as a singer making a comeback; The Illusionist, an animated art film based on a script by Jacques Tati; and Somewhere, directed and written by Sofia Coppola, about an actor and his 11-year old daughter.

The one film that is opening in wide distribution on Christmas Day itself is Gulliver's Travels, a remake in 3-D of the Jonathan Swift classic. It stars Jack Black as a travel writer who follows a lead about the secret of the Bermuda Triangle. He ends up on an island of tiny people and finds that he enjoys being a giant.

If the trailer is any guide, the story is being played broadly for laughs. The early critics, however, have not been laughing. Metacritic.com gives the movie an exceptionally low score of 27 out of 100, based on reviews by eight critics. David Fear of Time Out New York calls it an "unfunny, unentertaining lump of coal, and Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor calls it "monumentally dreadful." Anna Smith in Empire says it's a "low-grade comedy that'll have Jonathan Swift turning in his grave."

Steve Persall of the St. Petersburg Times is the lone dissenter of the group, writing enthusiastically that the film is "a good, Swift kick in the funny bone."

The film definitely seems to be a bad choice for adults who are craving something serious and subtle for their holiday afternoon. It might be fun for kids, though, or for adults who are in a goofy mood and/or are fans of Jack Black.

Sources: IMDB; Yahoo! Movies, and Metacritic. You can see the trailer and clips at Yahoo! Movies and IMDB.