The Pink Panther movie review (2006)
Clouseau is wrong, and so is Kevin Kline as Inspector Dreyfus, the role that Herbert Lom made into a smoldering slow burn. Kline and Martin both wear the costumes and try the bad French accents, but it's like the high school production of something you saw at Steppenwolf, with the most gifted students in drama class playing the John Malkovich and Joan Allen roles. Within 30 seconds after Kline appeared on the screen, I was remembering the Kevin Kline Rule from my Little Movie Glossary, which observes that whenever Kline wears a mustache in a movie, he also has a foreign accent. Please do not write in with exceptions.
The movie credits Edwards as one of the sources of the story, which is fair enough, since the movie's ambition is to be precisely in the tradition of the Pink Panther movies. It's a prequel, taking place before "The Pink Panther" (1963), and showing Clouseau plucked from obscurity for his first big case. The French soccer coach has been murdered on the field in view of countless cheering fans, and the Pink Panther diamond has been stolen at the same time. The pressure is on Dreyfus to solve the case. His inspiration: Find the most incompetent inspector in France, announce his appointment, and use him as a decoy while the real investigation goes on secretly.
Clouseau of course qualifies as spectacularly incompetent, and his first meeting with Dreyfus begins unpromisingly when he succeeds in piercing the chief inspector's flesh with the pin on his badge. Clouseau is assigned Ponton (Jean Reno), an experienced gendarme, as his minder. Reno survives the movie by dialing down.
Clouseau, as before, has the ability to begin with a small mistake and build it into a catastrophe. Consider a scene where he drops a Viagra pill, and in trying to retrieve it short-circuits the electricity in a hotel, sets it on fire, and falls through a floor. The mounting scale of each disaster is like a slapstick version of the death scenes in "Final Destination 3," where a perfectly ordinary day in the stock room can end with a death by nail gun.
