Review: "Around the World in 80 Days" Crashes and Burns On Takeoff

It's off and away in Michael Anderson's adaptation of the Jules Verne classic. Too bad the journey is a nightmare.

February 8, 2024

On September 7, 1940, nearly one year after the Invasion of Poland, the Luftwaffe, Nazi Germany's aerial warfare division, launched an 8-month series of attacks on the United Kingdom that would come to be known as "The Blitz."

Two weeks later, American broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow stood on a London rooftop and conducted a radio broadcast to the people of the English capital. He stood pat as German aircraft flew overhead, the sound of falling bombs whistling through the air. Every explosion was a step deeper into peril, and still, he remained. He was an icon of moral philanthropy, a monument to journalistic integrity and the daring to report the truth of tragedy. His courage in bringing the war into homes across the world received wide acclaim, as did the catchphrase with which he ended many of his broadcasts: "good night, and good luck."

It’s saddening to know such a vaunted figure in American history would curse his own people by participating in the accidental torture porn that is Around the World in 80 Days.

He brings us into the film with an unnecessary dive into the history of Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon,” and the loose film adaptation, A Trip to the Moon. It’s pointless, a shameless excuse to plug a pop culture figure into a big studio production. Conveniently enough, there is no better way to describe the movie.

It doesn’t tell a story as much as a travel itinerary drafted by a white man with no discernible concept of the world. Phileas Fogg, a wealthy member of the man-worshiping Reform Club, is challenged by his fellow Reformers to circumnavigate the globe in just 80 days. Equipped on his journey is a massive top hat where he stashes his enormous riches, profound entitlement, utter disrespect for any culture that doesn’t require sipping tea in fancy dress robes, and a frustrating lack of resourcefulness he readily compensates for by throwing money at the people most able to help him on his journey.

Thus begins a nearly three-hour international balloon adventure, hopscotching from place to place, firing an endless barrage of laughable whitewashing and typical 1950s stereotypes. It’s essentially a 180-minute novelty, reliant entirely on whimsical music, the principle of globe-trotting escapades, occasional bursts of color, and a litany of celebrity cameos meant to distract from the fact that for a movie basically titled “Many Interesting Things,” literally nothing happens.

The film’s sole worthy sequence, where Fogg and his loyal valet Passepartout ascend to the skies in a hot air balloon, carried from the castles of the English countryside to the mountains of Eastern Europe, backed by the iconic theme music that became an easy listening staple for the next three decades, is a visual marvel. It's a stunning example of the movie’s single good quality: for all its faults, and there are many, it's beautiful. Director Michael Todd understands framing and scenery: how best to make the moment pop with nothing but a little music and a well-placed camera or two.

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Outside that 2.7% of the movie, we have nothing. Fogg rescues an Indian princess, Aouda (played by Shirley MacLaine……………), from being burned alive by her village. During a train ride through the Wild Wild West, Fogg enters a duel with an impudent cowboy just before a tribe of Sioux attacks the train. In Yokohama, Passepartout has an unfortunate encounter with drugs. It all just happens, as though the concept of it happening should be enough to entertain.

The movie boils over with overlong scenes held in single-shot sequences, like a Spanish dancer tapping atop a table in a crowded club, or Passepartout getting roped into a bullfight. A bizarre extended shot of the ocean accompanies a drawn-out conversation between Fogg and Aouda, and the raid by the Sioux grinds the movie to a screeching halt despite serving as the final active pop in Fogg’s grand international adventure. Even arrivals and departures seem stretched beyond the realm of time; Fogg departs in horse and buggy from his lavish London quarters as though the seconds in this epic wager aren’t ticking by at all. The movie is essentially about the whimsical beauty of coming and going, not even the actual events that occur once you get to the destination. After a certain point, you wish everyone would just get on with their day; they only have 80 of them after all.

In the spirit of generosity, one could say it was trying to establish a parallelism between art and life, where just as Pan Am was taking people to international adventures on flights that stretched over a seeming eternity, we would see the same slog take place. One could also not say that and acknowledge that there’s zero feel for pacing, flow or narrative. The trio hops from adventure to adventure, but the movie never feels bonkers enough to be a spectacle, and it never feels strung together in a way that feels like a complete story. It’s essentially a tale of random things happening: a fair idea in concept, but a rather dull one in practice.

Perhaps all could be forgiven with a landed joke or two, but the attempts at humor, though admirable in their leaning towards British minimalism instead of American crassness, fall flat. Fix, the English detective set on catching the falsely accused Fogg, remarks that criminal matters should always come second to tea. Fogg recalls a time he knew a man who required his toast get served at precisely 83 degrees, wondering how one would even gauge the temperature of toast in the first place. It’s all very obvious and contrived, which is the film’s great failing: to be the very definition of obvious and contrived, yet fail at fulfilling your purpose in an interesting way.

Fogg isn't a globe-trotting delight, a free-spirited adventurer with loads of off-beat charm and a penchant for entertaining mishaps. Passepartout is the quintessential sidekick, inadvertently falling into high jinks that act as the climax for every chapter, but failing to be particularly interesting beyond his concept. Princess Aouda, a whitewashed version of Indian royalty, is the 50s version of a manic pixie dream girl, with all the feminine wiles a male protagonist craves but none of the pseudo-intellectual wisdom that would characterize her successors.

It all leaves us with nothing to say. We don’t require it to be any more than what it is, and yet it becomes the cinematic equivalent to the high school rock band, banging away senselessly in a garage, filled with dreams of packed arenas that will never materialize, believing itself to be something that it’s not. You won’t tell them they’re destined for dreary office jobs and middle-class monotony, but you will sip your morning tea in the kitchen every Saturday as they “practice,” knowing inside it’s all for naught.

If one intends to watch Around the World in 80 Days, they know now what they’re in for: a monotonous slog that amazes only in its seeming impossibility, that a movie built so heavily on color and spectacle could be so tedious and uninteresting. It's a true chore to get through, a film that requires a mental achievement akin to parting the Red Sea to finish. To those daring cinematic explorers, even more ambitious than Mr. Fogg himself, one can only say this: good night, and good luck.