A friend should grab Steve Martin by the neck and shake him hard: stop doing other people's characters. His "Sergeant Bilko" was a big pile of nothing dumped on the grave of the irreplaceable Phil Silvers. Bilko was created solely to be played by Silvers, and was based on the character Silvers had gradually forged over more than 20 years as a comedian. Martin shouldn't have touched the character.
Similarly, he should have left Peter Sellers' memorable Inspector Clouseau the hell alone. Alan Arkin took one shot at Clouseau (in "Inspector Clouseau" in 1968), and that didn't work out. Sellers (and director Blake Edwards) shaped Clouseau during rehearsals on the original "Pink Panther;" they didn't get along well, but the results were ultimately wonderful. Sellers' Clouseau is a movie icon that Martin was ill-advised to emulate hin his own "Pink Panther."
Now there's "The Pink Panther 2." The first with Martin was a lame, largely unfunny and nearly plotless mess, with Martin trying to batter Clouseau into a new, more Martin-esque shape. The problem is that as a comic actor, Martin has always been broad and buffoonish, loud and self-important. He had only the latter characteristic in common with Sellers' version of the character--and Sellers always made it almost endearingly clear that his Clouseau was secretly always apprehensive that he might really be a total loser as a cop. There's nothing of that in Martin's Clouseau, whose egomania is unalloyed--and in this movie, he even turns out to be right. He solves the crime mostly by happenstance, but partly by actual police work. Sellers would have been indignant.
But if you make the mistake of watching this farrago, you can be indignant on the late actor's behalf. Martin has achieved the impossible: a comedy totally devoid of laughs. The director was Harald Zwalt, auteur of "Long Flat Balls II," but mostly seems to have been a traffic manager whose duty was to stay out of Martin's way. There's not much to the story; a "dream team" of detectives is assembled, but what's that about? There are detectives from Italy, Japan and England, but they are just people, not based on famous fictional detectives (as in "Murder by Death"), nor on national stereotypes. They're not even their country's equivalents of Clouseau himself, which might have been the source for some comedy. Even though two of them are Andy Garcia and Alfred Molina, reliable actors (and Molina once played--badly--Hercule Poirot), but they barely register. Nor does Jeremy Irons, hauled in briefly as a cranky, filthy rich red herring.
It's in the sequence with Irons that we find the only moderately good idea. He lives in baronial splendor in a mansion on a vast estate; the building is equipped with closed-circuit cameras, with screens at Irons' hand. We see Clouseau sneaking from the viewpoint of one camera to another, which could have played out amusingly, but instead is broad and oafish. A telling comparison: in a Sellers' Pink Panther movie, he spins a globe, then stabs an index finger at it; the spinning globe throws him to the floor. He gets up, brushes himself off a little impatiently and goes on with the scene. A very funny, even classical, Couseau moment, right? Here, Martin stands on top of a similar globe, then zooms out the door, running on the rolling globe. Too broad and very badly timed, a fault of the entire movie.
There's an aura of desperation enshrouding the movie. Clouseau's assistant Ponton (Jean Reno) has been sent away by his wife, and he rooms with Clouseau. His two young sons, karate experts, also show up. But this stuff occupies time, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the movie. Making the sons karate experts suggest we're about to get a replay of the Kato vs. Clouseau battles that turned up in some of Sellers' Pink Panther outings, but this happens almost entirely off screen. Lily Tomlin has a few awkward scenes as a society instructor trying to get Clouseau to behave more genteelly--but this comes from nowhere and leads nowhere as well. These scenes aren't funny, though it's clear the filmmakers thought they were riots. If you have Lily Tomlin in your movie and can't come up with a single laugh, you've really blundered. Also, these scenes look quite literally like they were filmed later and spliced into the existing film in a vain effort to come up with something, anything, that might be funny.
John Cleese plays Dreyfus, so amusingly played by Herbert Lom in the Sellers films, and by Kevin Kline in Martin's first "Pink Panther." Here, Dreyfus' character is wildly inconsistent, preventing the talented Cleese from making much of an impression. He's reduced to helpless floundering and eyebrow-raising. Natalie Mortimer has a few good moments as Clouseau's secretary Nicole, who's not-so-secretly in love with him. The gorgeous Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is a kind of hanger-on who seems lamely crammed into the "plot," but who turns out to be important to the solution of the case. (Which involves the theft of several famous national icons, the Shroud of Turin for instance, by the mysterious Le Tornado.)
And all of this is in high definition on this Blu-ray set. If you are a die-hard Steve Martin fan, insisting on not just seeing but owning all his movies, you'll probably want to buy this. And in terms of how it looks, you won't be disappointed. Quite unlike Blake Edwards' well-designed films, "The Pink Pather 2" is visually all over the place with little consistency in terms of color or design. There are several striking sets, particularly the art-nouveau museum-like building where the Dream Team first gathers in what looks like a giant green wrought-iron birdcage. Irons' classical French-chateau-style mansion is also handsome. This is very attractive stuff but, of course, what you're intended to pay attention to isn't the décor.
Similar, so what if the sound is above average? (Actually, it isn't; it's just standard crisp, clear movie sound, the norm for today.) As long as you can hear the (limp) dialogue, that's all that's necessary in most comedies, epics like, say, "The Great Race," to one side. But for the die-hard collector, this probably is the best way to own this less-than-essential movie.
There's a gag reel no funnier than the movie itself, and a couple of self-congratulatory featurettes. The set also includes a separate disc of 27 "Pink Panther" cartoons. That was a very uneven series; a few of the Panther cartoons are classics, great short cartoons from a period when there were damned few good short cartoons, much less great ones. But the others were too dry, strained and uninteresting. A third disc includes a digital copy of the feature, just in case you want to watch it on your computer.
Video Quality and Surround Sound: Average for a Blu-ray disc of the current period.
Actors: Steve Martin, Emily Mortimer, Jean Reno, Andy Garcia, Alfred Molina, Jeremy Irons, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
Director: Harald Zwart
Script: Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber and Steve Martin
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