Starring Jack Black. Rated G. Opens Saturday, December 25.

There have been at least a dozen filmed versions of Gulliver’s Travels since 1902. So it’s safe to assume that the characters spawned by 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift won’t be forgotten any time soon. Still, one might have wished for a smarter retelling in the age of seamless CGI, 3-D, and what have you. This Gulliver, sadly, is little more than a vehicle for smirking Jack Black—also one of the producers—to do what he usually does, if more grandiosely.

Size matters in this tale, since the shifting perspective of giants versus Lilliputians is its philosophical and comic centre. So it’s okay that Black’s Lemuel Gulliver has been reduced to a mail-room clerk at a major newspaper. Instead of being a travel writer, Gulliver has a crush on one, played by Amanda Peet. Since she’s only in the film at its far ends, and is, of course, secretly in love with the Star Wars–fixated dweeb, is there any reason this part couldn’t have been played by, say, Janeane Garofalo?

The goofy casting doesn’t stop there. Once Gully gets to Lilliput, via a fluke deployment to the Bermuda Triangle, it turns out the wee people are governed by Billy Connolly, who provides little more than the only Scottish accent in a kingdom filled with Brit-voiced mini-folk. That includes Jason Segel as a commoner in love with a princess played by Emily Blunt, in a big comedown from last year’s Young Victoria.

On the whole, our plus-sized hero’s adventures are less than Brobdingnagian. And there’s not much here to illuminate the ongoing influence of the classic book (from which we also got the term “Yahoos”, for crude, backwater people). I did like it when he lashed some Lilliputians to a table for quick rounds of human foosball. But alas, such flights of wild imagination are rare in this surprisingly disposable lump of kiddie litter.