Review: Around the World in 80 Days
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Bottom line: You may cringe, but kids who aren't familiar with the classic story may enjoy the adventures and the always-likeable Jackie Chan. If nothing else, you can use the movie as a way to get your kids to check out the book (maybe read it as a family read-aloud).
The movie has a lot of slapstick-, cartoon-, and action-style violence, including many crotch injuries, but no one is seriously hurt. Characters use mild bad language ("bloody hell"). There is some crude and vulgar humor, including bathroom jokes, drunkenness played for comedy, a weird cross-dressing joke, and a comic situation involving a man with many wives. A strength of the movie is the portrayal of women and minorities who fight stereotypes and prejudice; however, some people may find some of the portrayals in the movie itself offensively stereotypical.
You might want to use the movie as a way to discuss how transportation has changed since the novel was written -- how many days would it take to circle the globe today?
What Parents Should Know
Bottom line: You may cringe, but kids who aren't familiar
with the classic story may enjoy the adventures and the
always-likeable Jackie Chan. If nothing else, you can use the
movie as a way to get your kids to check out the book (maybe
read it as a family read-aloud).
The movie has a lot of slapstick-, cartoon-, and action-style violence, including many crotch injuries, but no one is seriously hurt. Characters use mild bad language ("bloody hell"). There is some crude and vulgar humor, including bathroom jokes, drunkenness played for comedy, a weird cross-dressing joke, and a comic situation involving a man with many wives. A strength of the movie is the portrayal of women and minorities who fight stereotypes and prejudice; however, some people may find some of the portrayals in the movie itself offensively stereotypical.
You might want to use the movie as a way to discuss how transportation has changed since the novel was written -- how many days would it take to circle the globe today?
Common Sense Media Review
This movie may take its title from the Jules Verne classic
adventure about the man who circled the globe in 80 days to win
a bet, but it is really just a Jackie Chan movie, and a so-so
one at that.
Chan, who also produced, plays Lau Xing, valet to inventor Phileas Fogg (Steve Coogan). The previous valet quit because he refused to test any more of Fogg's wild contraptions. Xing, on the run after stealing a valuable jade buddha from the Bank of London, thinks the police will not find him if he is working for Fogg, so he pretends to be French and gives his name as "Passepartout." Fogg's bet with the peppery Lord Kelvin (James Broadbent) that he cannot circle the globe in 80 days provides Xing with the perfect cover for getting to China as quickly as possible to return the buddha to his small town.
There are a lot of stops in exotic locations and a lot of adventures involving obstacles to reaching the next stage of the journey and a few surprising cameo appearances, including the Governor of California as a sybaritic king.
Overplotted and under-imagined, this movie tries hard to distract the audience with razzle-dazzle, but not even the stunts or fight scenes make much of an impression and the preposterous final mode of transportation comes across as so lazy a concept it is almost insulting.
