Rush Hour was fun, as was Rush Hour 2. Shanghai Noon was fun, but strange. Shanghai Knights was strange. The Tuxedo and The Medallion were neither fun nor strange; after the opening scene of The Tuxedo (with the deer pissing into the pure mountain water), they were just blah. So one may expect that I went into Jackie Chan’s new movie with a certain amount of trepidation.

Justified, I think.

I have never been a great fan of Jules Verne, but his stories have been responsible for at least a couple of memorable movies — Journey to the Center of the Earth, all James Mason fans must see it, and, of course, the 1950s make of Around the World in 80 Days, which — to a great extent — followed the original book (though one may regret that David Niven’s Fogg did not punch Detective Fix in the nose, but simply accused him of being an abominably bad whist player — a sin certain to condemn the man to the seventh circle of England’s Hell). Even better, perhaps, was Harmony Gold’s 1989 miniseries of the same name with Pierce Brosnan as Fogg.

By comparison, the new movie is a turkey.

As with Verne, we start out with the Bank of England being robbed; but this time we see the villain, who is in fact not a villain but a heroic Chinese named Lau Xing (Jackie Chan), attempting to recover a stolen Jade Buddha for his village, Lanzhou. Fleeing from the police he finds himself in the garden of Englishman Phileas Fogg (Steve Coogan), who has somehow changed from a British gentleman of leisure to an ambitious British inventor. Lau, somehow given the name Passepartout by Fogg (a misapprehension of “passport … too?”), follows him not to the Reform Club but to the Academy of Science, which is ruled over by the pompous, villainous blowhard Lord Kelvin (if there are any acting awards to be given out for this film, they should be given to Jim Broadbent for this part), in company of his boon companions Colonel Kitchener of Scotland Yard, Lord Rhodes and Lord Salisbury, for whom, at one point, Kelvin promises to name a beef dish. We may hope that the descendants of these four illustrious British lords do not sue the movie-maker, since none of them seems to bear the slightest resemblance to their models. Anyway, Lau maneuvers Fogg into making a bet with Lord Kelvin that he can go all the way around the world in eighty days, Kelvin to give up his post in the Academy to Fogg if Fogg wins.

The trip around the world is first complicated by a romantic lead, a hat-check girl who imagines herself an impressionist artist in Paris, Monique (Cécile de France). This, of course, leaves no room for Verne’s Princess Aouda, a staple of all previous versions (one of Shirley MacLaine’s earliest roles), and indeed, rather than crossing all of India and then sailing around Southeast Asia, the now-three intrepid travelers go overland through the Himalayas so that they may reach Lau’s village of Lanzhou, where we get more deeply involved in a plot with an evil warlord General Fang (Karen Mok) to steal the Buddha (why? this is never made clear; Fang, who is all snarl and long fingernails, never explains) and also get to see Chan, with an assist from aging Chinese martial artist Sammo Hung, strut his martial stuff. After finding out that he has been gulled, Fogg now sets out on his own, on foot; between foot and oxcart, we may suppose that the journey from India to the East Chinese coast would take considerably longer than 80 days, but this is glossed over. In this final third of the film, which includes all North America — and Lau and Monique, who catch up with Fogg in San Francisco — we also meet the Wright Brothers and actually get to fly in the first aircraft, invented, of course, by Fogg.

The movie is amusing — and a kudos to Ewen Bremner as Inspector Fix, who spends most of his time taking the lumps that were omitted from the Mike Todd film. Watch also for the Governor of California — and his statue. But it’s not earth-shaking, and I certainly hope that the next remake of Verne’s book will be somewhat more true to the original story and less a vehicle for one of the characters to show off his martial arts virtuosity.