Grade: C-

Verdict: Cantinflas didn't do no kung fu fighting.

By BOB TOWNSEND
Cox News Service

The best news about Disney's clumsy and tedious remake of "Around the World in 80 Days" as a martial arts travelogue starring Jackie Chan is that it's only a tad more than two hours long.

The original Oscar-winning 1956 movie clocked in at around three hours.

Based on the 1873 Jules Verne novel, it starred dapper David Niven as the fastidious, time-obsessed British inventor, Phileas Fogg. And it featured legendary Mexican comic Cantinflas as Fogg's enterprising and madcap valet, Passepartout.

Among the first crop of widescreen blockbusters, the intercontinental extravaganza employed producer Michael Todd's innovative 70 mm optical process (Todd-AO), a refined comedic sensibility and a huge cast of great actors in cameo roles -- including the likes of John Gielgud, Charles Boyer, Cesar Romero and Shirley MacLaine.

Forget all that if you must see "Around the World" 2004. What remains is the barest essence of Verne's yarn. Fogg, played by feisty British TV comedy actor Steve Coogan, wagers his Royal Academy of Science rival Lord Kelvin (Jim Broadbent) that he can circumnavigate the globe in just 80 days. After that, the original gets turned upside down.

Chan, in the Passepartout role, has top billing and takes up a wearying amount of choreographed screen time with his kung fu fighting stunt/action scenes. Coogan, who only rarely gets to display his droll wit, is forced to play confused second banana to Chan. And sometimes even third banana, once plucky Cécile De France is introduced as thrill-seeking French artist Monique La Roche and becomes a traveling companion/ love interest.

Watching Coogan's face as Hong Kong-born Chan and Belgian De France mumble and fumble their lines in barely intelligible English might have amounted to a good running joke, as it was with Niven and Cantinflas. Instead, it's more pathetic than amusing, and seems to epitomize the inability of director Frank Coraci ("The Waterboy") to breathe any kind of life into what is so plainly a dead-on-arrival movie idea.