The good news is that it isn’t as bad as might have been
expected — or as bad as most re-makes, or re-castings of classic
movies turn out to be. The bad news is that it still isn’t very
good. Steve Martin can be a funny guy, but he’s no Peter Sellers
and should never have agreed to co-write and star in a sort of
remake — technically a prequel — of The Pink Panther.
But nor is he Phil Silvers, and that didn’t stop him from messing
around a few years ago with Sergeant Bilko, and with even
more disastrous results. What is it that makes Mr. Martin want to
keep matching himself against such comic geniuses — and not just
comic geniuses but men who have created, as he has not, an
unforgettable comic character that will always be associated with
their names? This is perhaps a matter for his psychiatrist, but a
child could have told him that The Pink Panther was a
mistake.
Actually, that’s just it. The new Panther is a movie
for the dimmer sort of children who can’t tell the difference
between an immortal comic creation like Sellers’s Inspector
Clouseau and Martin’s pale imitation. The difference, in case they
want to know, is the difference between a comic character — like
Charlie Chaplin’s tramp or W.C. Fields’s bank dick or Laurel and
Hardy in their screen personae — and a comedian with an array of
gags in his box of tricks but no character of his own to make him
interesting apart from the gags. Mr. Martin’s most unforgivable bit
of tampering with the classic prototype of Clouseau’s character is
to make him smart. Or rather, to make him smart and dumb.
First he’s dumb. So dumb that he’s even dumber than Sellers’s
Clouseau. So dumb that he makes a sack of stones look smart. But
then he gets smart in the end, instead of merely lucking into his
success — which of course only makes the caricature more
offensively false.
That neither Steve Martin nor his co-writer, Len Blum
(Private Parts), nor his director, Shawn Levy (Cheaper
by the Dozen, Cheaper by the Dozen 2) cares about
such a glaring inconsistency in character shows that they don’t
understand the material they’re working with. For Clouseau’s
stupidity is of his very essence. And not only his stupidity but
the desperation with which he constantly has to hide it. Mr.
Martin’s Clouseau is too stupid even to know he’s stupid. Except
when he’s smart. Nor is there any logic or attempt at plausibility
in the transitions between the stupid and the smart Clouseaux. The
guy who’s saying in one scene that it’s quite a coincidence that a
dead body fell exactly into the chalk outline around it is replying
quite wittily in the next to Clive Owen in an uncredited cameo as
“Nigel Boswell, Agent 006. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes, that you are one short of the big time.”
And then there’s the occasion when sidekick Jean Reno — looking
woefully out of place as the lone authentic Frenchman here — warns
Clouseau that an invitation from sexy Beyonce Knowles to her hotel
room “may be a trap” and the Inspector replies: “Who cares?” Yet
this is a guy who is too dumb to know that “good-cop-bad-cop”
normally requires two cops at a minimum or that a man’s greeting
his killer by saying, “It’s you!” doesn’t mean that he should round
up everyone in Paris with the name “You” (or Yu). By the time that
the usually reliable Kevin Kline, who can get no traction with the
Herbert Lom role as Chief Inspector Dreyfus, tells him that he is a
“hopeless, deluded idiot,” we find it difficult to respond, as the
music tells us we are supposed to, with sympathy for the idiot on
account of the blow to his self-esteem. “You mean, I wasn’t
promoted because of my merits?”
Oh, come off it! There’s no reason left for thinking that this
could possibly have come as a shock to him, or that he could have
felt hurt if it did. And then to turn around and show this idiot
working out for himself the identity of the killer and the
whereabouts of the missing diamond, the eponymous jungle feline,
just to show old Dreyfus how mistaken he is is the height of
absurdity. In other words, there is no attempt to make anything
about this movie look like reality, which is not quite the same
thing as a merely unbelievable movie like the original Pink
Panther (1963) or A Shot in the Dark (1964) — the
film that was actually the first in the series, though it was
released second. Those earlier pictures still had a tether to
reality, which was enough for Mr. Sellers to build his comic
creation on. This Pink Panther is just an excuse for jokes
and pratfalls.
As I have suggested already, some of the jokes are funny, sort
of. I especially liked the one where, in a classic detective story
move, Clouseau picks up a ringing telephone on the desk of a
suspect before the suspect can get it, sure that the voice on the
other end will give him valuable information about the man’s
criminal connections — and then proceeds to make a deal with a
telemarketer for cell phone service. “I think I just got a good
deal!” he announces triumphantly. But such isolated laughs are not
enough to save the picture, or for us to forgive Steve Martin for
undertaking roles so far in excess of his capacities.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie
critic.
