Soccer coach Yves Gluant (Jason Statham) is murdered in front of thousands of onlookers. His prized possession, a ring sporting the Pink Panther diamond, has gone missing. Police Chief Dreyfus (Kevin Kline) devises a scheme to win himself a medal of honour he will publicly assign the case to incompetent Inspector Clouseau (Steve Martin), while secretly using a crack team of investigators to solve the crime. He brings in noble policeman Ponton (Jean Reno) to "assist" Clouseau, as the bumbling inspector trails Gluant's girlfriend, pop sensation Xania (Beyonce Knowles).
The potential of a Pink Panther remake has a startling relevance to modern times: in Edwards' original, the Pink Panther diamond was stolen from an imaginary Arab country, and it was in the spirit of a self-interested foreign policy that the French government struggled to recover it. Here, though, it is merely a shiny Western bauble.
Director Shawn Levy has helmed some of the most tiresome studio comedies of the past few years. His previous effort with Steve Martin, Cheaper By the Dozen, had many of the saccharine elements found here, where were largely absent from the Edwards films, whose humour never tried to elicit sympathy). Where Edwards's film was a comedy so mod it became an emblem of its era, Levy's "prequel" is passé in its poor attempts to update itself for the 21st Century.
Martin's Clouseau has an idiot mania about cell-phones and ring-tones that becomes gradually intolerable, and the few moments of Sellers-inspired physical comedy (a destructive parallel-park job with a Smart Car, the incidental destruction of an antique table) are outweighed by the cute idiocies of Clouseau and his cohorts. The sexy song-and-dance of Claudia Cardinale is here replaced with the frivolous glitz of Beyonce Knowles, whose big closing number is accompanied by Martin and Reno doing their own "sexy dance" in skin-tight latex jumpsuits.
This new Panther is a heartbreaking peroration on an archetypal clown, the once amusing Clouseau ballooning here with sentimental stodginess. The unlikely hope is that the Levy-Martin team will produce no follow-ups. (Sony)
The potential of a Pink Panther remake has a startling relevance to modern times: in Edwards' original, the Pink Panther diamond was stolen from an imaginary Arab country, and it was in the spirit of a self-interested foreign policy that the French government struggled to recover it. Here, though, it is merely a shiny Western bauble.
Director Shawn Levy has helmed some of the most tiresome studio comedies of the past few years. His previous effort with Steve Martin, Cheaper By the Dozen, had many of the saccharine elements found here, where were largely absent from the Edwards films, whose humour never tried to elicit sympathy). Where Edwards's film was a comedy so mod it became an emblem of its era, Levy's "prequel" is passé in its poor attempts to update itself for the 21st Century.
Martin's Clouseau has an idiot mania about cell-phones and ring-tones that becomes gradually intolerable, and the few moments of Sellers-inspired physical comedy (a destructive parallel-park job with a Smart Car, the incidental destruction of an antique table) are outweighed by the cute idiocies of Clouseau and his cohorts. The sexy song-and-dance of Claudia Cardinale is here replaced with the frivolous glitz of Beyonce Knowles, whose big closing number is accompanied by Martin and Reno doing their own "sexy dance" in skin-tight latex jumpsuits.
This new Panther is a heartbreaking peroration on an archetypal clown, the once amusing Clouseau ballooning here with sentimental stodginess. The unlikely hope is that the Levy-Martin team will produce no follow-ups. (Sony)
