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The big question, of course, is why anyone would want to film even one remake of Blake Edwards’s 1960s comedy series, let alone two. Presumably Shawn Levy (the director of the first and an exec producer on this one), thought it a wheeze to introduce a new generation to the tomfoolery of blundering French detective Jacques Clouseau. Well, he was wrong, because the only connecting, indeed redeeming, feature of these remakes is Henry Mancini’s marvellous opening theme.
‘The Pink Panther 2’ kicks off with by-the-book Inspector Clouseau (Steve Martin) clinging to a speeding car, from which he is catapulted straight into the first of many deeply unfunny slapstick sequences. The story, such as there isn’t, revolves around a ‘dream team’ of international detectives (Andy Garcia, Alfred Molina, Yuki Matsuzaki) charged with capturing the elusive thief of the Pink Panther diamond. Against his superior’s wishes (John Cleese, funny for a change), Clouseau is assigned to the task and… you can guess the rest.
On paper, the wild ’n’ crazy Steve Martin would seem as good a bet as any to play the late Peter Sellers’s disaster-prone detective; in practice, however, he is hopeless. It’s not just his disappointing body language – something Sellers was especially good at – it’s his unamusing faux-French accent. Where Sellers got the inflection down to a politically–incorrect tee, Martin fumbles it from the off. And that, in a nutshell, is reason enough to avoid this as one might any other calamity.