Starting things off is a commentary track by director Frank Coraci and star Steve Coogan. Well, just one, except you have the option to have the film play with an alternate opening (some ridiculous CGI dream involving a chicken). Two versions of the film are available here.
From the galloping feet of the horses in the film’s London to Jackie Chan’s nonstop kicking and screaming, this track never misses a beat. The same could be said about the Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track: Dialogue is a little on the flat side (still, it’s nothing a dialogue enhancer can’t fix), but the surrounds employed throughout are rather remarkable. Colors are so luxurious that it’s easy to forget how horrible the material really is. Glorious through and through, this Around the World in 80 Days disc may be one of Buena Vista Home Entertainment’s best. Once again, another bad film gets the red carpet treatment on DVD. If you can get past the horror of a brown-faced Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a Turkish prince, it’s nice to know that someone had the brains to poke fun at the governor of California by suggesting that he was the model for Rodin’s Thinker. That said, it’s to the filmmakers’ credit that they do have a darling time evoking how inventions like the Salisbury steak got their names. Unlike Anderson’s film, though, this claptrap’s cameo appearances are by and large embarrassing and exist only to flatter the audience’s memory banks. Indeed, I thought I was watching Shanghai Knights in spots, and that was way before Owen Wilson pays a visit. Since fans of the action star probably couldn’t care less about how he’s essentially and consistently subjugated on screen, the good news is that Around the World in 80 Days should satisfy anyone looking for superfluous, anachronistic fight sequences. Which is to say that a Chan is reduced to a “Chinaman” stereotype throughout the film, as in a ludicrous subplot involving a stolen Buddha that’s meant to explain the so-called other’s presence in London.
In the film’s funniest scene, Lau Xing subverts a game of telephone to his advantage, but considering the smile on his face and cloying twinkle in his eye, you’d think that he did it for a Scooby snack and not for the dignity of his people. Admittedly, some of the Luhrmanesque CGI interludes between Fogg’s geographic pit stops are kind of fun and breathless, but you’d be hard pressed to find similar such delirium working its way through the actual living-breathing elements of this new Around the World in 80 Days. As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the film lacks pizzazz and has zilch to say about an early 19th-century culture’s struggle for modernity. One hour shorter and about 20 times more expensive to produce than Michael Anderson’s Oscar-winning original, this new take on the Jules Verne classic feels as if it were made on a conveyor belt. Frustrated that England’s Minister of Science, Lord Kelvin (Jim Broadbent), won’t take him seriously, eccentric London inventor Phineas Fogg (Steve Coogan) guns for the man’s job by traveling around the world with a thief-in-hiding, Lau Xing (Chan, playing the race card previously dealt to Cantinflas in the 1956 version), and a wannabe impressionist painter, Monique (Cécile de France). Frank Coraci’s remake of Around the World in 80 Days exists only to give Jackie Chan a hundred different places to knock people out.
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