Jonathan Swift probably never dreamed of the consumer excess that would elbow its way into the great satire of “Gulliver’s Travels” all these centuries later. No doubt he’d have been keen on poking fun at this new world — Swift had a fascination with human failings of the most base sort — but I don’t think a three-story Coke can that’s washed up on the shores of Lilliput with all the other debris in the latest film adaptation is what he’d have in mind. With director Rob Letterman (“Shark Tale” and “Monsters vs. Since this a modern-day telling, the modern world intrudes from beginning to end, and in 3-D. And that won’t exactly be pretty. Well it is and it isn’t. 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. But Black’s brio is off — too much here, too little there, only occasionally right. But this story is not just about Gulliver.

Imagine Amanda Peet in “The Godfather,” or in “Some Like It Hot,” or in “Citizen Kane.” They all get a little bit better. This Lilliput is modeled even more lightly than Swift’s was on a not-jolly-old-England with its royalty and rubes, rigid rules and warring kingdoms. It’s just “a little story,” she tells him. 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. Not with a hose, exactly. Mild amusement is probably about right. Swift was the wizard behind that one.