An unnecessary journey

Mike Todd's Oscar-winning version of Jules Verne's tale was by no means a classic but it is still a yard or so ahead of Frank Coraci's new adaptation. This has Steve Coogan in the David Niven part as Phileas Fogg, the inveterate inventor, and Jackie Chan substituting for Cantinflas as Passepartout, his robber valet. The net result is sufferable, but no great shakes on the performance level.

Coogan, who acted straight extremely well in Michael Winterbottom's 24-Hour Party People, gets little chance to do anything very coherent here; Chan is merely his usual amiably energetic self, probably despairing of ever doing an American movie that matches his best home-grown efforts. Added to which, the film has such an oldfashioned look that you might well think the 1956 version was the more modern. It can't cut it as a spectacular adventure and has to rely on a kind of blustering energy to compensate.

The story has Fogg betting the nasty old head of the Royal Academy of Science that he can get around the globe in 80 days. He sets out in a balloon - cue brief appearance of Richard Branson in a funny outfit - stopping off in Paris, Turkey, India, China and America before landing with a bump back in London in a newfangled flying machine.

Each venue has a bevy of wellworn clichés and there is hardly any sense of fraught travelling from one part of the world to another. What we get is predictable, except in the case of Turkey where the real-life Governor of California appears fetchingly as a pasha with a yen for Monique (Cécile De France), the girl whom Fogg reluctantly takes along but in the end falls for.

In support is Jim Broadbent doing his darnedest to be an outrageous villain of the Establishment, and since he, like Bill Nighy, never gets a bad review I don't propose to break that record here. We also have Kathy Bates looking passably regal as Queen Victoria. But it is a lumbering effort, directed by Coraci with a merciless use of reaction shots that invariably forces his actors to mug furiously.

Around The World In 80 Days
Cert: certPG