Around the World in 80 Days (Walt Disney Pictures, Walden Media, Spanknyce Films, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a quite entertaining even if a bit peculiar movie from 2004, Around the World in 80 Days. The story began as a novel published in 1872 by pioneering French science-fiction writer Jules Verne, which had its first English translation a year later, but it had to wait for 1956 before anyone made a movie out of it even though other Verne stories had hit the screen well before it. That version was produced and directed by Mike Todd and featured David Niven as the story’s central character, Phileas Fogg, who impulsively makes a bet of 20,000 pounds at the club he belongs to (“club” in the British sense of a private organization for upper-class Brits who want to get away from anyone else and only hang out with others similarly situated) that, using only readily available means of transportation, he can circumnavigate the globe in just 80 days. His impulsive decision to go on this quest flabbergasts his newly hired valet, Passepartout (played by the Mexican comedian Cantinflas in the 1956 version and by Jackie Chan, of all people, in this one), who’s had a wildly adventurous life and was hoping to settle down into a job that wouldn’t require much of him. (A footnote in the original novel explained that in French a “passepartout” – which literally means “goes through everything” – is what we would call a skeleton key: a key that can open any lock.) The two set off around the world and are chased by Inspector Fix of Scotland Yard, who’s convinced that Fogg has robbed the Bank of England of 55,000 pounds and is fleeing the country with the loot.

The imdb.com list for Around the World in 80 Days has seven entries, including a video-only release in 1988, two TV mini-series in 1989 (presumably the later was a sequel of the earlier), another TV series with no date listed and a new version, presumably a theatrical release, dated 2021. This version was produced by Walt Disney Pictures and essentially ran the story through the Disney meatgrinder – when the opening credits (I miss opening credits) read, “Based on a novel by Jules Verne,” I joked, “That should probably read “Sorta-kinda based on a novel by Jules Verne,” and I was right. In this version Phileas Fogg (played with a marvelous dry wit by Steve Coogan) isn’t a retiring upper-class Brit whose only excursions are to his club, but a free-lance inventor with a penchant for developing motorized vehicles and attempts at a flying machine. His attempts to test out these various devices have led the neighbors to hate him for all the noise they make and all the property damage they cause when they crash. Fogg is trying to crash the Royal Academy of Sciences and be accepted as a Fellow, but the head of the Royal Academy, Lord Kelvin (Jim Broadbent, whom we’d just seen in the brief but important role of the judge in Vera Drake) not only can’t stand him but believes that everything worth inventing has already been invented and therefore there’s no need for further research. In this version Fogg makes his bet with Kelvin; if he makes it around the world in 80 days Kelvin will step down as the head of the Royal Academy and sponsor Fogg as his replacement, while if he loses Fogg will agree never to work on any more inventions again.

The biggest question Charles and I had about this movie was how on earth director Frank Coraci and the three Davids who wrote the screenplay – David N. Titcher, David Benulio and David Andrew Goldstein – were going to fit Jackie Chan into it. They did so by having him play Passepartout – or, rather, a Chinese named Lau Xing who came to Britain to recover a valuable jade statue of Buddha that had been stolen from his village and made them vulnerable to outside attack. Only the people who stole the jade Buddha had deposited it for safe-keeping in the Bank of England, and Lau Xing stole it but only to return it to its rightful owners, his family back in China (who seem to have been played by Jackie Chan’s real-life extended family). Needless to say, the sinister Chinese who stole it in the first place want to recover it from Jackie Chan – oops, I mean Passepartout – and a woman commander named General Fang (Karen Joy Morris, though according to imdb.com her real name is Karen Mok) who has long metallic fingernail claws that are themselves lethal weapons. (I joked that they could make a sequel in which she marries Wolverine.) These baddies are in the movie for an obvious reason: to give Jackie Chan the chance to do the big martial-arts set pieces that made him a star in the first place and his audiences naturally expect. Inspector Fix is a part of the dramatis personae, but here he’s played by Ewen Bremner as a Monty Python-style comic-relief character and he’s not really a Scotland Yard inspector, but only someone paid by Lord Kelvin to pose as one to delay Fogg on his journey and ensure he loses his bet.

And instead of Fogg’s love interest being an Indian widow who was about to be burned in a suttee (which, at least according to Jules Verne, was an ancient Indian ritual in which a wife was burned on her husband’s funeral pyre because there’d be no reason for her to go on living without him; Verne explained that the enlightened British rulers of Indian had banned that barbaric custom but in this case it was being brought back by the husband’s family, who wanted to keep his money in the biological family instead of having her inherit it) until Fogg and Passepartout rescue her, she’s Monique La Roche (Cécile de France), an aspiring artist who works as a coat-check girl in a Parisian art gallery and who flees with Fogg and Passepartout, carrying a painting of the Spirit of Man ascending into the air which Fogg likes because he wants to invent a flying machine and just has to figure out the steering for it. Along the way they meet a few guest stars (though not the barrage of cameo appearances that jarred the audience again and again in the Todd version), including Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Turkish potentate who wants to keep Monique as wife number seven; Richard Branson as a man running a hot-air balloon concession, Rob Schneider as a hobo Fogg meets in San Francisco after a con-woman has stolen his valises and all his money, and Owen and Luke Wilson as Wilbur and Orville Wright, whom Fogg encounters in a stagecoach in the middle of the U.S. Western desert. They haven’t built their airplane yet but they’ve at least designed it, and Fogg is impressed that they’ve solved the steering problem he’d been unable to work out.

That comes in handy when, after missing the steamer across the Atlantic that was supposed to be the final leg of his journey thanks to Inspector Fix and General Fang, who collaborated with Lord Kelvin to kidnap Fogg and his party in exchange for Kelvin’s help in tearing down the Great Wall of China to get at the fabulous wealth of underground jade deposits beneath, they end up on a peculiar craft, powered by both sails and paddle wheels (I had thought a paddle-wheeled steamer was impractical on the ocean), which Fogg ends up chopping into bits not merely to power its steam engine (as in the book and the Todd film) but to construct a flying machine with which he will literally fly to the steps of the Royal Academy in time to make his bet., Only he finds Lord Kelvin and his crew blocking his way to the top step (his necessary destination) and threatening to have him arrested when a deus ex machina emerges in the person of Queen Victoria (Kathy Bates, looking quite like the photos of the real one), who overhears Lord Kelvin cursing her out – Kelvin turns to the camera after a pause and says, “She’s standing behind me, isn’t she?” as she is doing just that, a rare bit of irony and awareness of the movie conventions and their hackneyed nature one doesn’t get much of in the Three Davids’ script – and immediately orders the way cleared for Fogg to ascend the steps while informing him that he’s a day early because in the continual adjustments of his watch to keep correct time wherever he was, he and Passepartout had forgotten about the International Date Line. (This is one gimmick that actually does come from Jules Verne’s novel.) The 2004 Around the World in 80 Days isn’t much as a Verne adaptation, and as Charles pointed out it ignores most of the darker parts of the book it’s nominally adapting, but on its own merits it’s a charming and very entertaining movie. I do have a hard time believing in the hype about Jackie Chan still doing all his own stunts; maybe he did them all in his 20’s or 30’s, but it seems unlikely that he still could do them all at 50, his age when this film was made, let alone at his current age, 67!