Every Version of Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours

Mike Todd's Around the World in 80 Days won the Academy Award for Best Picture and it earned it. David Niven plays Fogg with exactly the right quality: a man whose stillness is itself a kind of comedy. Cantinflas as Passepartout is a genuine star turn. The film runs three hours and uses every minute of them, dropping the audience into forty-four locations with a cast of cameos that reads like a Hollywood hall of fame. It is a love letter to the possibilities of cinema at the exact moment widescreen spectacle was at its peak. Nothing made since has matched the sheer audacity of its scope.

The 2021 BBC/PBS co-production with David Tennant as Fogg and Ibrahim Koma as Passepartout actually interrogates the novel's assumptions: colonialism, class, the violence of empire. Fogg is not a charming eccentric but a man running from something. Leonie Bly as a journalist provides a perspective the book never had. It is slower than the premise suggests, and that slowness is the point. It ran for two series and quietly built a case for being the most intelligent version of this story ever filmed. If you came for the wager and stayed for the politics, this is the one.

The 2004 film keeps the title and the wager and discards everything else. Jackie Chan plays Passepartout as a martial-arts superhero on a secret mission that has nothing to do with Verne. Steve Coogan is game but stranded in a script that has no idea what it wants to be. The action sequences are competent Chan, the comedy is flat, and the story is incoherent. It is not an adaptation so much as a franchise pilot that never launched. The best thing about it is that it makes the 1956 film look even better by comparison.