By Sean Howell
Director: Shawn Levy
Starring: Steve Martin, Kevin Kline and Beyonce Knowles
Runtime: 93 minutes
Rated: PG
Playing: In Theaters
(U-WIRE) STANFORD, Calif. â?” Inspector Jacques Clouseau, the bumbling detective that Steve Martin plays in the newest “Pink Panther” film, was first brought to life by Peter Sellers in the early 1960s. The “Panther” brand would not have survived for over 40 years without Clouseau, a send-up of the suave Sherlock Holmes types that had previously dominated American detective cinema.
While Holmes pays close attention to his surroundings, taking in every detail to build a case that he will unravel at the climax, the super-serious Clouseau observes the details of his surroundings so closely that he becomes oblivious to everything else around him, stumbling over chairs, ignoring key clues and generally causing more trouble than the villains he chases.
Sellers also perfected an absurd French accent that provided the bulk of the “Pink Panther” films’ humor. For example, one vintage Clouseau line is “Have you a license for your minkey?” Martin, with more gray hair than Sellers ever had but with the same ridiculous accent, has adeptly updated the character, adding a bit of his own flair to the 10th “Panther” film (Sellers appeared in six of them).
Sellers’ version was more subtle — much of the humor in his films sprung from the character’s tendency to injure himself, whereas Martin’s Clouseau inadvertently harms others (particularly bikers, for some inexplicable reason).
Martin’s version comes off as stupid, rather than sweetly ignorant. He also plays the character with a condescending cockiness, taking the trait a step further than Sellers’ unceasing self-assurance.
But it is to Martin’s credit that he sticks with his own brand of humor. Along with co-writer Len Blum, Martin made some superficial tweaks to bring the character into the 21st century — Clouseau takes Cialis and gets his jollies over the Internet — but the silly jokes and ludicrous plot are comfortingly similar.
Clouseau is summoned to Paris when the most valuable diamond in the world, dubbed the “Pink Panther,” is stolen from the head coach of the French National soccer team, who was killed in the process. Parisian Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Kevin Kline) hires Clouseau — the “village idiot” from a nearby town — to solve the case in order to set him up so that Dreyfus can assemble a crack team of private investigators and steal the glory when Clouseau fails (it doesn’t make any sense, I know, but for me that’s part of the movie’s charm).
Clouseau gets a sidekick in this film, Gendarme Gilbert Ponton (Jean Reno), who winces at every one of Clouseau’s malapropisms and shoddy pieces of detective work.
The case takes Clouseau to New York, where he hunts down, and almost has a fling with, the French coach’s former girlfriend, pop star Xania (played by a predictably flat Beyonce Knowles). Clouseau also develops an obsession with hamburgers, and his inability to pronounce this word plays a central role in the plot.
Just as the previous “Panther” films served as mere vehicles for Sellers’ comic genius, this version gets pretty thin and formulaic outside of Martin’s masterful touch.
The plot doesn’t matter, but it never has. The brand of humor that Sellers mastered with Clouseau has come down to us in the overly serious, totally oblivious characters perfected by Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller and co.
This film is as much a capitalization on that trend as a re-packaging of Sellers’ original brilliance. As a result, the character feels more familiar to us than it might have to its original audience. Fortunately, Ã?an American doing a bad impression of a French accent will never lose its comedic value.
