AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS: Around the World in 80 Days is a charmless, by-the-numbers extravaganza, writes Donald Clarke

This uncalled for remake of Mike Todd's notoriously cameo-heavy 1956 travelogue does not, as is the vogue these days, return to the original source. The presence of Jackie Chan, here playing a more than usually pugnacious Passpartout, dictates that Jules Vernes's novel be radically redecorated in the style of a chop-socky comedy, and that Phileas Fogg (Steve Coogan sounding weirdly as if he is faking an English accent) be relegated to the status of onlooker.

How did something so peculiar come to pass? Well, the movie is a vastly expensive - and, as the accounts currently stand, financially ruinous - independent production, drawing funding from any number of sources, and nothing feels quite right about it. The computer-generated animations look as if they were run up on your dad's Amstrad Partytime. The star cameos - with the possible exception of a humiliating appearance by the current Governor of California - are not all that starry. And the dialogue, if we can dignify it thus, sounds as wobbly and uncomfortable as if it were being simultaneously translated from some other language.

As you probably don't need to be told, the movie begins with Fogg wagering some of his more fogeyish acquaintances (here, bizarrely, the Lords Kitchener, Salisbury and Kelvin) that he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. Coogan's Fogg, an inventor of pointless contraptions, is really a version of Professor Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and this Around the World strives for that film's rainy-bank-holiday-nothing-else-on-the-telly charm without the benefit of any hummable tunes to distract the over-fives.

In truth, had I not endured it, I would have been tempted to describe it as unendurable. (Then again, what else should we expect from the director of The Waterboy?) The only thing it has to recommend it is the effortlessly charming performance of young Cécile de France as an aspiring painter with an anachronistic taste for album-sleeve surrealism who attaches herself to the travellers in Paris. Let us hope that one of the half-dozen or so people who sees the film is a producer and that she gets a job out of it. Donald Clarke