Let’s be honest: Nobody likes remakes.
While there are a select few reboots that took the original source material and evolved it productively, it’s hard to see any value in the mountainous piles of crap that have built up over the years because someone saw a movie and thought they could do it better. Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho,” anyone?
But few things can come close to the awe-inspiring disappointment that was the 2006 remake of “The Pink Panther.” While remakes are bad, remaking the things that a distinguished actor is most famous for is worse. Inspector Clouseau made Peter Sellers a household name and was arguably his signature character. The remake casts Steve Martin in his stead, a talented comic actor who unfortunately screwed the pooch, or panther.
In fact, the entire cast of this film is loaded and equally to blame. Kevin Kline, Jean Reno, Emily Mortimer, Kristin Chenoweth, even Beyoncé lends herself to the role of popstar Xania. Despite probably being a riff on Xenia Onatopp from “GoldenEye,” she turns out to not be a femme fatale, which might be for the best. Queen Bey might be a spectacular singer, but a renowned actress she is not.
Sadly, just about everyone in this cast underperforms. The only person who approaches a good performance is Kline, as the spiteful condescending Chief Inspector as his Juilliard-trained snobbiness takes over. He also gets to use his ludicrous accent from “French Kiss” again, which is always nice. But Mortimer is forced to be too constrained, and Reno has to play the begrudging straight man/expository fountain to Steve Martin’s madness.
Truly, the crux of the problem lies with Martin, who provides maybe his worst performance ever. The only exception is “Pink Panther 2,” but that’s bad enough that I’m about 60 percent sure reality warped and that it doesn’t actually exist.
His best performances usually come when he is permitted to be droll and witty while surrounded by craziness — see “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” for further evidence. Here he’s forced to put on an accent even more outrageous than Kline’s and he never settles into it. He looks uncomfortable when he talks, like he has to force the words out through his mouth.
The things he does just don’t make sense in any rational world. In the Sellers original, he was bumbling, but everything he did connected reasonably to reality. This Clouseau does things like connect jumper cables to his testicles and jam his hands into priceless vases. Honestly, if it came out now I would half-expect him to be secretly evil and using his charming idiocy as a cover for his nefarious deeds.
That would have been much more interesting than the plot I got. Instead, the viewer gets to watch this idiot man-child fail his way up the Parisian police ladder, only managing to figure out the plot thanks to pure coincidence and bizarrely encyclopedic knowledge of Russian military training.
And, of course, he gets the girl, despite the fact that his unrelenting moronic tendencies should scare off any potential mate within a 50-mile radius.
