The Pink Panther 2 (*½)

Directed by: Harald Zwart
Starring: Steve Martin, Jean Reno, John Cleese, Andy Garcia, Emily Mortimer, Alfred Molina, Aishwarya Rai, Jeremy Irons
Seen: March 8th 2009

*½ Out of ****

I went to see Steve Martin’s first Pink Panther movie with my family, and we really enjoyed it, had a few good laughs, and made a good evening out of it, even though it was a bad movie amidst some amusing jokes. I was hoping for more of the same from this one, but alas, the bubble has burst. And maybe it started bursting in the first movie, and just finally and emphatically collapsed with this one. The film is filled with stupidly irrelevant material seemingly in the film for one reason: to flesh out the running time from a sitcom episode to a feature film…

Jacques Clouseau (Martin) is back in action, and this time he starts out as a traffic officer – where Chief-Inspector Dreyfus (this time Cleese) relegated him to after the events of the previous film. And this starts us on the first completely irrelevant scene, for almost 5 minutes Clouseau bumbles along, first writing a ticket for a traffic infringement, and then attempting to hand it to the driver, who has in the mean time shown up at his parked car.

The film itself starts with a montage of museum scenes – tour guides telling people about their one prized possession which then turns out to be stolen, glass smashed and all, by the Tornado, a famous criminal. A dream-team of investigators are called in, Vincenzo (Garcia) from Italy, Pepperidge (Molina) from Britain, Kenji from Japan, Sonia (Rai) from India, and Clouseau from France, but not after the best scene in the film, in which Chief-Inspector Dreyfus hears that Clouseau is requested as part of the team. Clouseau comes barging in, a bull in a china shop, and destroys evidence while being terribly self-important and arrogant as to his skills of investigation.

Things go along and by the time Jeremy Irons came on screen as the millionaire Avellaneda, I was wishing I had stayed home and watched Die Hard 3, in which Jeremy Irons sounded the same, but was part of a better movie – it was good to see Mr. Irons again, I haven’t seen him in any movie for quite some time. The most irrelevant scene in the entire film belongs to Steve Martin again, who, with Ponton’s (Reno) two sons, karate-trash his Paris apartment for way too much screen-time.

Of course Clouseau gets to make a comeback and solve the case by way of some minor clever deduction, but by this time you don’t care anymore, and just want the film to end, since the last laugh also happened a long time ago. I enjoyed the pretty bad first Steve Martin Pink Panther film, but only give this terrible second one a half above the minimum one star rating for the extremely sweet Nicole (Mortimer), who, while even here the accents employed where too much, was quite endearing.