Around the World in 80 Days

Around the World in 80 Days

It’s a fun comedy made from the high-concept “Around the World in 80 Days.” I grew up with Phileas Fogg and his picaresque journey, plundered the Classics Illustrated comic, read Jules Verne and went to Michael Todd’s 1956 film, but I never felt it was much of a cliffhanger. Even then, 80 days seemed doable. More like it were Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “From the Earth to the Moon.”

But here is a movie that does some lateral thinking, that moves Fogg off dead center and makes Jackie Chan’s Passepartout his real hero; that lingers for comic effect instead of always looking at its watch. Todd wallowed in cameos (“Look! There goes Frank Sinatra as a piano player!”) so let us dutifully note Kathy Bates as Queen Victoria, Owen Wilson as Orville Wright, John Cleese as a British sergeant and funniest of all (because least expected), Arnold Schwarzenegger as an Ottoman prince.

We know what happens. Phileas Fogg is universally resented by all members of London’s fogbound Explorers’ Club because they are stuffy Victorians with no imagination who resent him for inventing all those crackpot gadgets they’ve been using to get laid with each other. Lord Kelvin (Jim Broadbent), president of the club, is a mainstream scientist who undoubtedly gave his name to the scientific term “kelvin,” which measures how many degrees of separation there are between you and Sir Kelvin Bacon, inventor of gravity.

Fogg claims an object can circle the globe in 80 days; Kelvin scoffs at this notion (which he has also expressed in kelvins) and says either (a) Fogg circles or (b) he resigns from clubland: Either (1) Fogg circles the globe by deadline and Kelvin resigns from club, or (2) Fogg resigns and discontinues his confounded experiments. Fogg (Steve Coogan) accepts the bet, and as he’s preparing for his journey, he hires a new valet: Passepartout.

This valet we have already met, making a sudden exit from the Bank of England after having stolen the priceless Jade Buddha, a relic much treasured by his native village in China and nabbed by the Black Scorpions, hirelings of the evil warlord Fang. Passeportout’s hidden motive for joining the journey is to elude the police, sneak out of England and return the Buddha to China.

So off we go horse, train, ship, hot air balloon etc. There is a brief stop at an art fair in France where they are joined by Monique (Cecile De France), who insists on coming along on their expedition and cannot be dissuaded; we think at first she has some nefarious motive but no, she’s probably just taken a class in screenplay construction and knows that every film needs a sexy female lead. This may be unique in cinema history: It may be the first case of a character voluntarily entering a movie because she is required by its screenplay.

Fogg is Passepartout’s straight man for much of the journey, which allows Chan to steal scenes with shameless mugging. But everything goes more or less as expected until the three reach Turkey and are made guests of Prince Hapi (Schwarzenegger), whose hospitality is indistinguishable from captivity.

Smitten by the fragrant Monique, he invites all three to join him in the Turkish equivalent of a hot tub, saying ruefully, “I’m always embarrassing myself in front of visiting dignitaries.” It may not be worth the price of admission, but it’s almost worth it to hear Schwarzenegger exclaim proudly: “Guess who else was in this pool? U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes!”

The director, Frank Coraci, uses Verne’s structure to avoid any need for real continuity. When one location runs out of gags including an extended stay in Passeportout’s native China, where Fang and the Black Scorpions do their best to win back the Jade Buddha from the grateful village where it has exerted its benign charm for centuries they simply move on.

So it’s across the Pacific and into the American desert, where Fogg spots a woman selling postcards (“What can a woman possibly know about travel?”) just before he meets two bicycle salesmen named Wilbur and Orville Wright.

They generously share their ideas for an airplane; that comes in handy somewhere around here when Fogg’s chartered steamer runs out of fuel over mid-Atlantic and our intrepid circumnavigators invent an airplane and fly to London.

Oh, wait: Before that there is an extended martial arts scene in a New York warehouse where Jackie Chan dispatches 50 or so bad guys while dangling from a hook on a chain next to a humongous crate on which rests well, never mind what rests on the crate.

None of this amounts to more than goofy fun, but that’s what the ads promise, and the movie delivers. It’s light as a fly, but springs some genuinely funny moments especially by Schwarzenegger, the Wilsons and the irrepressible Chan.

The California governor’s scenes were shot before he took office, and arguably represent his last appearance in a fiction film; if so, he leaves the movies as he entered them a man who shares our amusement at his improbability, and has a canny sense of his own image and possibilities.

I met him back in the ’70s when “Pumping Iron” was being released, Mr. Universe was then the first of the offices he would hold. I liked him then, I like him now, and I remember that when I introduced the film at the USA Film Festival in Dallas where it played under its original title: “Arnold Knows He Can’t Act” he greeted the audience warmly and then slipped off to study his business textbooks in a quiet corner of the green room. He refused to be dismissed as muscles with an accent; he got the joke.

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