Many reviews here complaining that the movie is not faithful to the book... oh, please, it's a lot of boring people in today's world.

I'm 55 years old, I read the book when I was young, I saw the movie with David Niven, and I say this version with Jackie Chan is extremely fun and cute.

"Ah, but it's not true to the book at all." And? If you want to see the same thing, go read the book or look for the version with David Niven, which is more faithful, but is a pain in the ass to watch. I would even understand this type of complaint if that was the purpose of the film, but it is clearly not, the proposal here is to make a light, fun comedy that brings good feelings, only superficially based on the book by Jules Verne, and this objective was achieved in my opinion. I had fun during the 2 hours of projection and it was worth my time invested.

Rating 7 out of 10.

Very unfaithful adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, yet much more entertaining than the tedious and wildly overrated but relatively faithful David Niven version. The movie is breezy and enjoyable, with some fun fight scenes, although it is completely inconsequential.

I think it would help when watching this movie to have not read the book, because one cannot help but think that the extensive rewriting was not necessary. Passepartout's character could have been expanded for Jackie without so many other changes. Changing Phineas to a bumbling, goofy inventor was clearly done in an attempt to make the movie into another version of the buddy movie that has been Jackie's greatest friend in the U.S., but Coogan is unexceptional in the role and doesn't have a lot of chemistry with Jackie, so they really should have just done the character as written, which could have made for a much smarter movie.

In spite of plot holes and some silliness though, I enjoyed this, at least in that, watch-a-movie-on-TV-on-a-Saturday-morning way.

Lau Xing (Jackie Chan) steals the Jade Buddha from the Bank of England and escapes from the police. He finds shelter with inventor Phileas Fogg (Steve Coogan) taking the name Passepartout. Lord Kelvin (Jim Broadbent) demands the Buddha's return from General Fang before supporting her in China. Kelvin laughs at Phileas and his ideas in the Royal Academy of Science. They bet Phileas traveling around the world in 80 days. Kelvin hires bumbling inspector Fix (Ewen Bremner) to stop them and then orders their arrest. In Paris, Moonique La Roche (Cécile De France) joins them.

I don't like the addition of the Chinese story although the fight in Paris is great fun. It distracts from the basic story which is the adventure of traveling the world. The movie diminishes the drama of the ticking clock. The best moment in the story is when they think they lost the race at the finish line. This movie makes it an after-thought. Lots of the movie makes no sense time wise although logic is not a necessity. Coogan and Chan could have chemistry but their characters take a long time to connect. I don't know who Cécile De France is but she was OK. Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance is horrible and he puts the movie on a downward trend that it never recovers from.