Something strange seems to happen to comedians once they’re about two or three generations past their prime. It isn’t just that they aren’t as funny as they used to be (though that is almost always the result), but they seek to find a whole new, almost always more mainstream (and more kid-friendly), audience. Sometimes this is the result of their sensibilities becoming so dulled and repetitive that they lose the audience they have (which is what seemed to happen with Woody Allen), but sometimes comedians seem to be doing this on purpose. I can only assume that this is what has happened with Steve Martin.
I didn’t see the last Pink Panther movie (nor, embarrassingly, have I seen the original), but I found this one easy enough to follow. Inspector Jacques Clouseau is perhaps the greatest detective in all of France, most renowned for having found the Pink Panther diamond. When a thief who goes by the name of ‘the Tornado’ starts stealing valuable artifacts across Europe, an international ‘dream team (a phrase that is repeated ad nauseum)’ of investigators is assembled to try and crack the case. I’ll give you five guesses as to who they want to head the team.
The most immediate indication that something fishy is up here is the cast, which is probably the single best to be assembled for a feature film in the past year. Andy Garcia, Emily Mortimer, Aishwarya Rai, Alfred Molina, Lily Tomlin, John Cleese, Jean Reno (the single coolest Frenchmen since Maurice Chevalier), and Jeremy Irons are all in this movie, believe it or not. And they are all given virtually nothing to do except look around awkwardly at one another while Martin’s Clouseau bumbles around, says stupid things, and speaks in an accent with virtually the same sense of finesse and accuracy as Borat (not the worst thing). I can get behind centering a movie around a bumbling Steve Martin performance (twenty years ago, not one of us would believe that there would ever be anything wrong with this), but to fill a movie with such a great cast and then to waste all of them so completely feels just short of criminal (the comedic potential of Irons alone is enough to fill an entire movie). Particularly to waste them all in favor of a performance that is only intermittently amusing.
That said, there is some of the old Martin in there. He delivers a great number of his lines with enough finesse to get a laugh when other comedic performers might let them drop. There are a few bits that have potential, especially Tomlin’s part as a ‘politically correct’ officer meant to bring Clousseau up to speed in the modern world (though strangely, he is only offensive when she’s around). Some of Martin’s old irreverence is clearly visible when he refers to the Japanese member of the team as his ‘little yellow friend,’ as well as when he ogles younger women in the hallway (save for Tomlin, they are all much younger women, however). Frankly I was surprised to see this sort of thing in a movie marketed towards children and families, but it started to make more sense when I realized how cut short the subplot was, and how carefully they kept the whole thing PG. More than once, I got the feeling that they (they being director Harold Zwart and screenwriters Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber, and Martin himself) had really wanted to take this all the way, perhaps even to an R rating, but that they were forced to bring it back into nominally family-friendly territory. I understand the reasoning, but it’s always depressing to see a movie with such a visible leash put on it. Especially when it seems fairly clear that it was the star who put it there.
"The Pink Panther 2" opens February 6, 2009 and is rated PG. Comedy. Directed by Harold Zwart. Written by Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber, Steve Martin. Starring Steve Martin.
