Around the World in 80 Days (1956)

Rating: 65%
Alright next on the best picture winners from the 50's, we have Around The World in 80 Days...nuff said.

Plot: 1872, an English gentleman Phileas Fogg claims that he can go around the world in 80 days. So he makes a bet of 20,000 pounds with the fellow members of the Reform Club. So with the help of his new valet Passepartout, Fogg starts to travel either by balloon, ship or train to try to go around the world in that amount of time before he loses everything due to the wager.

So...yeah this is another film among the best picture winners that falls into the "nice" category. But let's start with what's good about it.It's pretty loyal to the book. I mean I haven't completely read the book myself, but I have heard most of the beginning and end and maybe some parts of the middle here and there from a book on CD in my dad's car from when we went on a trip into the mountains one time. But I'm pretty sure that's enough for me to know the very basic main points of the all around story, and it seems they did all of that pretty well. This film does a decent job at really exploring all these different parts of the world. And finally Passepartout did a really good job as the comedy relief for the whole film. But then you have what's bad about this film: firstly, I feel they may have given Passepartout a little too much attention. I mean he makes the film entertaining, but I think that gave us little to go with for Fogg or some of the other characters. Maybe that's how it is with the whole story in general. I don't really know for sure since I didn't read the entire book, but maybe that's a general issue for not giving us a whole lot with any of the other main characters. Secondly this film was much too long. There were some scenes that needed to be cut down, because I don't think it really needed to be 3 hours and a couple of minutes long. Finally I can't help but not like how they ended the movie. I"m not spoiling anything, but how they used the last minute or so seemed way to abrupt and stupid to really make sense as a way to end the movie.

And that's my review for Around the World in 80 Days. It's a light-hearted film that tells the story well as far as I know from listening to some of it from the book on CD, it can be pretty amusing to see so much of the world from just this film, and you get a fairly entertaining performance from Passepartout. But otherwise it's doesn't give us a whole lot on the main characters aside from Passepartout, it's way too long and it finishes in a way that I personally found to be dumb. It's a decent flick to give us the story of Around the World in 80 Days, but it's not much after that.