Around the World in 80 Days (2021)

 

This uneven miniseries has a fun idea behind it, but drags in places, and doesn’t balance out the seriousness of its subtle politicking with humor. While the cast is good, it just never grabbed me by the throat and refused to let go.

 

Phileas Fogg (David Tennant) has been in a slump for thirty years. He has become so entrenched in his routine, he has never deviated from it. One boring morning seated in his club, sharing his usual breakfast with his usual friends, he hears about how navigating the world is now possible because of modernization and says he bets it could be done in eighty days. His friend Bellamy (Peter Sullivan) says Fogg certainly couldn’t do it, and Fogg decides then and there he’s going to do it. The two men wager twenty thousand pounds on him making it around the globe in eighty days, which would bring him back to London on Christmas Eve.

 

After a scuffle with the cook in the club’s kitchen, a server, Passepartout (Ibrahim Koma), overhears about the wager and offers himself under false pretenses as a valet to Fogg, to get out of London before he’s arrested for assault. The two of them haven’t gotten halfway to Paris before the ambitious young Abigail Fix (Leonie Benesch) comes running after them, desperate for a byline with her very own name printed on it. She is determined to prove herself to her publisher father (Jason Watkins) and intends to travel alongside them, whether or not they like it.

After foundering into the middle of a revolution in Paris, getting into trouble on a train through Italy, almost dying in Yemen, and getting into the middle of a mess in India, the trio remain determined… even though unbeknown to them, an assassin is on their trail, determined to stop them, no matter what it takes. Each episode stands as a separate adventure in that part of the world, and one featuring the wild west even has a fun subplot with Bat Masterson, the famous Black marshal. That one turned into my favorite, because of all its potential. The characters trade off on who gets the other two out of a mess, show a moderate amount of affection for one another, and two of them even fall in love, while another grapples with a lost love from his past.

  

This story has all the right components to be terrific, but it’s just… not. I wanted to love it and get sucked into it, and some episodes were a lot more that way than others, but overall there was nothing that made me want to see it more than once. I actually tried getting into it several years ago, and quit after the first episode. This time, I persevered and enjoyed the second one a lot better, but it’s a series of vignettes strung together, with Fogg just not being a very likable chap. He’s narcissistic, self-absorbed, blunt and clueless, not to mention something of a coward… and he recovers our affection toward the end, enough that I liked him later on, but it takes an investment to get there.

 

Including a Black member of the trio both works and doesn’t. It works when the situation calls for racial tensions; at least this story doesn’t pretend that everyone was fine with Black people back in the 1800s and treat them as equals (as we see in most “oh, slavery never happened in this version of history” cinema these days). Those around him actually treat him like they would have at the time… which adds the necessity to create racial tensions, disapproval for a mixed-race relationship, and shines in the Bat Masterson episode, where Passepartou is dually impressed that a former slave has had such a successful career. That episode is terrific.

 

The politicking may be why this miniseries isn’t as fun as it could have been; it takes itself too seriously and is trying to write a commentary on the social mores of the time. In just about every episode, we have to see some injustice or another—racism, sexism, inequality, etc. And trying to moralize at the audience (particularly along the vein of anti-white male racism) is a splendid way to ruin a good story. It slows down the narrative, it forces in debates that there isn’t time to resolve, and it just isn’t fun to watch. And it’s a shame, because this is a good cast, and most of the characters are likable. The last episode is one of the best, and it leaves the door open for an underwater sea adventure in the future that will never happen, since the second season was quietly canceled after lackluster reviews. Watching it, I enjoyed it but you never want to be in the middle of something and comparing it to the fun you had watching a separate adaptation...

   

Sexual Content:

A woman mentions having affairs, and how a newspaper man wanted her to run away with him; when she said no, he slandered her in the press.

  

Violence:

Some shooting in which people are killed or harmed in the Old West and in New York City. People get punched in the face. Various perilous situations, but nothing graphic. 

 

Language:

A handful of uses of hell and damn.