TheRetroCritic

For someone like me, who enjoys Jules Verne's classic novels, reviewing a big, Hollywood, kid-friendly modern day movie adaptation of Around The World In 80 Days isn't easy. Especially since, usually, these new adaptations barely have anything to do with the source material. Remember that Journey To The Centre Of The Earth 3D movie with Brendan Fraser? You don't? Good. Honestly, I was expecting about the same level of laziness from this movie. I thought this would bypass the book completely and do its own thing without ever referencing what it's actually adapting. Surprisingly, as much as the movie changes stuff from the book, and it changes A LOT, there is still an attempt to keep the basics of that plot in there. For example, the whole arc which follows Jackie Chan's character and is, in fact, a big subplot in the movie: none of it happens in the book. Something about a Jade Buddha being stolen from Chan's village in China, him robbing it back and

Whether you know about Alan Partridge or not, you've surely heard of Steve Coogan. Well, to give you an idea, Partridge is Coogan's Borat . He's a rude and awkwardly stuck-up talk show host/radio DJ who wears bad sweaters, lives in Norfolk, drives a Lexus and talks kinda funny. Oh, and everything he does tends to turn sour before crashing and burning in usually embarrassing turns of events. So now all you uninitiated folks are roughly up to speed: on with the review. In this big screen outing, we find the character working as a radio DJ in Norwich for a station which is undergoing a take over. When he learns that his job might be on the line, Partridge quickly jumps at the chance of saving his own ass and throws one of his colleagues under the bus. Colm Meaney's fired employee, Pat, doesn't take kindly to all that so one night he takes control of the radio station and holds several people hostage before demanding for Partridge to be his go-between with the po