|
 |
Around The World In 80 Days Director: Frank Ciraci PG Now Showing< 
Maybe, just maybe if I was six years old again I might've enjoyed this hackneyed, clumsy and tackily put together bumbling disaster. All through this horrible, sketchy insult to one of the greatest classic adventure stories of all time there were plenty of laughs from the audience, but mostly the same type of giggle one usually hears from gleeful tots at a circus. You know? The clown gets bopped in the nose and the clown falls down kind of laugh? Okay, the fight scenes were far more colourful than that, otherwise it wouldn't be a Jackie Chan film, and with the obvious intent of lessening much of the impact so that it would pass by the censors with a PG rating, I have to concede that 'Around The World...' succeeded in delivering some PG fun.And then there's the storyline, which strays immensely from the original but held enough potential so that it should work. Set in the late 1800's, madcap inventor Phileas Fogg (uninspiringly played by Steve Coogan) hastily takes on a wager to circumnavigate the world by any means possible in 80 days . Away he goes, accompanied by his 'French' valet, Passepartout (Jackie Chan). Only this time the two are joined by French artist, Monique La Roche (Cecile de France), who, despite actually being French came across as faux French, both with accent and her decorative looks. As cute as this might have been, I found such stereotyping annoying. Now, here's the twist. Passepartout had just robbed the Bank of England, not for cash, but for a sacred jade statue of Buddha which was originally stolen from his home village in China. On the run from the law, by luck he teams up with Fogg (who doesn't have the foggiest that he's a crook) and Passepartout sees this adventure as his passport out of London and the way to get back home. God knows how anyone could possibly stuff up such a simple plot? Yet, despite dragging this debacle out for two hours, director Frank Coraci ('The Waterboy' and 'The Wedding Singer') appears to have a lot of difficulty pacing his scenes out and maintain some sort of symmetrical balance. This became irritating as the trio skipped from one location to another without much consideration shown toward how they either got there, or even the purpose of them being there. To finish off, there has to be some mention of the near countless cameos that endlessly crop up throughout. Many of which are so fleeting that I'm not going to bother naming them (in fact, I must admit I missed many), but to give kudos for the ones that did come off I'll make mention of Luke and Owen Wilson as Wilbur and Orville Wright, and a fantastic few second showing and two-word skit from failed around the world balloonist, Richard Branson. Of the more laborious drawn out scenes, here we'll be left wondering why Arnold Schwarzenegger chose the role of a womanising Turkish prince knowing darn well that this could easily come back and haunt him come next election. Jackie Chan has made his fair share of awful films since going Hollywood, but somehow his undeniable martial art skills nearly always makes them at least entertaining, and given that he wanted to do this for the kids I'm not even going to bother to critique his performance. Here, I'm going to lay the blame squarely on the director - God help him should Chan suddenly wake up to this and decides to seek some revenge.  |
|
The latest issue available now!     |
All content copyright dB Magazine