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THE PINK PANTHER Send This Review to a Friend
Peter Sellers owns the role of the bumbling French Inspector Clouseau, but Steve Martin stakes out a claim in his own right. There’s really no need for comparisons. Sellers was sublimely funny. Martin is hilarious in his way, at least when “The Pink Panther” retread allows him to be. Some gags are exceedingly funny, while others fall flat, which, come to think of it, has been the case in previous “Pink Panther” expeditions.
The plot is corny, as usual, but functional. Kevin Kline plays Dreyfus, Clouseau’s boss, who hires him as a red herring to ineptly lead attention away from the Dreyfus’ investigation of an athlete’s murder ant the theft of the Pink Panther ring. Dreyfus then hopes to solve the crime his way and win a major honor. Kline, good actor that he is, provides amusement getting into the deadpan swing of the role of the superior whose life becomes a shambles thanks to Clouseau.
Martin is in his element when he has to engage in the slapstick situations and gags required. He is especially funny trying to learn to speak in American-accented English. I didn’t know there were so many ways to mispronounce hamburger. As for his French accent, he is a riot—as was Sellers. “I would like to see your bowls,” he asks, but it comes out pronounced balls.
Jean Reno is stoically droll as Ponton, assigned to keep tabs on Clouseau. Beyoncé Knowles is gorgeous as the singer Xania, in the thick of the complications. Emily Mortimer is serenely lovely and funny too as the assistant who is sweet on Clouseau. But he, with similar leanings, says it is wrong to do things that might be seen as office harassment, sealing his qualms with a pat on her rear.
Martin and Len Blum, who wrote the screenplay, struggle to keep coming up with funny ideas. That’s not easy, given all that has gone before. The fact that they succeed part of the time is no small feat. But mainly, it is fun just to see Martin inhabit the character and come up with the zany sort of stuff we once associated him with before he brilliantly broadened his range. A Columbia Pictures release.
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