Movie Review: The Pink Panther

The Pink Panther (2006) 

Directed by Shawn Levy 

Written by Len Blum, Steve Martin 

Starring Steve Martin, Kevin Kline, Jean Reno, Emily Mortimer, Beyonce Knowles

Release Date February 10th, 2006

Published February 9th, 2006 

It’s not that Steve Martin is no longer a funny guy but, with his last few pictures, save for the exceptional romantic drama Shopgirl, he has really stunk up the joint. Cheaper By The Dozen 1 & 2 and his teaming with Queen Latifah in Bringing Down the House are vapid exercises in the most tired of cliches. The streak of joyless and mostly humorless comedies continues with The Pink Panther, a flailing cannibalization of the famous Peter Sellers film series.

Inspector Jaques Clouseau (Martin) is the model of ineptitude. As a gendarme of the French police, Clousseau's beat has long been the one place where he could do the least amount of damage. However, when the French national soccer coach (action star Jason Statham in a brief cameo) is murdered and his legendary pink panther diamond stolen from his dead body, it is Clousseau who is given the high-profile case.

The chief of French Police Dreyfus (Kevin Kline) chose Clouseau not for his investigatory skill, but rather to be the public face of the investigation. While Clouseau screws up in front of the cameras, Dreyfus and his team can solve the case behind the scenes and then take all the credit. To insure Clouseau does not screw up too badly, he is assigned a partner, Gendarme Gilbert Ponton (Jean Reno), who will attempt to keep Clouseau out of trouble.

Pop star Beyonce Knowles shows up as Xania, an international pop star, solely for the purposes of eye candy and for the soundtrack synergy. The pop star has no relevance to what there is of a plot. Poor Emily Mortimer, playing Clouseau's secretary, is stuck with the thankless role of his love interest, leaving Beyonce to merely provide the film with a marketable pop song for the soundtrack CD.

Once you accept that this is not much of a movie and more of a sketch-comedy exercise, the whole thing comes down to how funny these sketches are. And within that limited criteria, the results are quite mixed. The Pink Panther is exceptionally hit and miss. Certain scenes, such as Clouseau's introduction to Chief Inspector Dreyfuss, are laugh out loud funny. However, the sketches that don't work, like the attempts at bawdy adult humor or Clouseau's dirty-old-man infatuation with Xania, are far more uncomfortable than funny.

Director Shawn Levy is to the comedy genre what Uwe Boll is to sci fi. Okay, maybe he isn't quite that bad. Mr. Boll does set quite a standard, but for the relative ease of his chosen genre, the family comedy, Levy is unquestionably a hack. He can point the camera and capture what is in frame, but he has zero insight into how one scene should flow to the next. Levy has no sense of how to establish a comic or dramatic flow, no sense of storytelling and he has the visual sense of a blind squirrel.

I have not seen the original Pink Panther since the era of the large-form laser disc, so my memory of Peter Sellers as Clouseau is spotty at best. I know from experiencing other films of Director Blake Edwards, who directed Sellers in the original, that he is a far superior director to Shawn Levy, so it seems safe to assume that this new Pink Panther cannot match the original. Call that observation unfair or uninformed if you like, but it's inescapable that Levy is not a great director.

As for comparing Steve Martin and the legendary Mr. Sellers, I have to believe that Steve Martin certainly could match the talent of Peter Sellers. I have seen so much great work from Steve Martin, granted not much recently, that I have to believe him capable of being Peter Sellers' equal. In this film however, with this director, Martin is at a loss to bring this legendary character to life. Martin flails and falls with vigor but it's all for naught. Martin's goose was cooked the second Shawn Levy was named director.

So what, if anything, works in Pink Panther? For Steve Martin being, a complete failure at drawing laughs is impossible. Martin works very hard for what few laughs he gets in this dreadful film, but he does get a few and most come from his teaming with Jean Reno. In a better film, Martin and Reno could have riffed two complete funny performances but in Reno's sporadic screen-time, often cut short for more of Martin's dirty old man bit or the film's bizarre extended James Bond riff, they only have time for a few funny moments, the film's funniest moments.

Also, the teaming of Martin and Kevin Kline as Chief Inspector Dreyfus is inspired, but as with many of the ideas that went into this movie, the teaming is half-baked. Kline has only a handful of scenes with Martin, some very funny, some very much not. Like Martin's teaming with Reno, I watched Martin work with Kline and longed for a different, far better film to feature these two exceptionally talented actors.

The Pink Panther has been marketed as a family movie, so I should warn parents that the family movie tag was one forced upon the film. The Pink Panther was intended as an outrageous borderline R-rated comedy filled to overflow with prurient humor about Viagra, Beyonce Knowles' fine form, and a running gag about Martin and Emily Mortimer getting caught in compromising positions. The Viagra and the leering Clouseau's creepy eyeing of Knowles remain, as does the running gag about Martin and Mortimer, though I understand in much shorter form. These jokes do not belong in a supposed family movie.

Some might say if Sony, the studio that took over the prized property after purchasing MGM, mandated these changes that I should cut director Shawn Levy some slack. I would, if I thought these naughty scenes that are now either truncated or cut completely had the potential to be funny, but I don't see that. Watching what is left of the initial Pink Panther cut, I think Sony likely performed a salvage and rescue rather than the destruction of something bawdy and brilliant. 

Remakes are, more often than not, lazy cash grabs, and while there is little about Steve Martin's performance in Pink Panther that could be called lazy, there is an unquestionable stench of greed and the desire to cash in on a well known property. Worse yet, there is unshakable malaise around The Pink Panther that even Martin at his most manic cannot escape. Whether it comes from director Shawn Levy's poor direction or the general laziness of remakes is debatable.The Pi