Back in 1963, a movie called the Pink Panther came out. Well received, it went on to become one of the more popular movie franchises, and even went on to get it's own cartoon series involving the "Pink Panther" himself (in the movies, the title character was actually a pink diamond, the main character was actually a French detective name Jacques Clouseau). Redone in 2006, the new movie starred Steve Martin as the detective, out to find out who stole the Pink Panther diamond. Having seen the movie I would suggest you take a look at it as the movie is smart and clever. But we're not here to review that movie, instead we are here to review the sequel, the Pink Panther 2.
(As this will be a long post I will tell you my verdict so you don't have to waste your time if you have no liking of long posts. Pink Panther 2 is a sad, unfunny, and incomprehensible crap-fest and it makes me feel sad for the actors who should be in much better material then this.)
Story:
Having retrieved the Pink Panther Diamond in the first movie, Jacques Clouseau is now recognized as one of the world greatest detectives and he is recruited to join a "dream team" of expert detectives who hope to stop a criminal known as the "Tornado" (why he calls himself this is unknown to probably even the writers) who has been stealing priceless artifacts from all over Europe.
That's the gist of it anyway. While that sounds smart for a movie (well a screwball comedy anyway) in execution the story is terrible, why? All of the filling of the story is cliched and really, really, dumb. There isn't an element of the story (besides the basic premise) that seems new and innovative and this all leads to a very boring and unpleasant experience, made even worse by the fact that the material is simultaneously very stupid and seems to be written for people on the same IQ level as the common meal worm. Admittedly the point of a comedy is to create funny stories that aren't serious but this is just terrible. On that note, lets talk about the comedy
I actually did something like this during the movie.
Action: (There is only one,really bad action sequence, I couldn't put comedy into any other grouping so here it is)
Every comedy fills in it's film with, um, comedic sequences and The Pink Panther 2 isn't different in this regard. The problem is that the comedy is absolute shit. True their are a few moments where I smiled and I laughed at one joke. But that is it, I only laughed at one single joke, and when I smiled I'm not sure if I actually like the joke (or rather the attempt at one) or I just got happier because my dad (who was drunk while watching this movie) laughed hard and that got me interested. But despite this I feel that the movie only made me laugh because those were jokes that anyone could have laughed at. Whenever I smiled the movie had done a cheap joke (ever heard of a cheap scare? Well the principle is the same) that any other director could have done and the jokes just seemed, well cheap. There was nothing clever or intelligent about the jokes this movie conceived, they just seemed like child's play, merely pointing out dumb things that we as human beings do which to me seems really uncreative and the mark of a novice comedian. Part of the problem is that the characters are merely comedic foil, which is what I am going to talk about next.
This movie in a nutshell.
Characters:
The characters include: Jacques Clouseau a bumbling detective, Phanfort (or something like that) another french detective who is forced to move out of his home for a while, a British detective who is brilliant at deduction (!), an Italian detective who is suave and a ladies man (!!), and finally a Japanese detective who is good with computers (!!!). As you can tell, the characters are basically steriotypes so uninteresting that I have forgotten there names.
I do have to hand it to the movie, this got some good actors. Each of the characters is really well done acting wise making them seem human. The problem is that acting is 50% of a movie character and the movie earns a zero in characterization. The characters don't have any personality besides quirks that anyone has and they all seem in the movie purely to serve as comedic foil. Basically all the stuff I listed in that are all we get for characterization, which is really sad. There we literally two moments in this movie where I was sad because the actors we doing such a good job (considering what they had to work with) and yet the scene showed them doing the stupidest things imaginable (at least for comedy), it just seemed so cruel and unfair to be doing that to such talented people. So I would really give two thumbs down on the characters.
Conclusion: The Pink Panther 2 is nothing more then a serious of sad circumstances, sewn together by an incompetent writer (I don't blame the director here) who has no idea what comedy is. With a horrendous story and failed characters the Pink Panther 2 is the worst comedy movie I have ever see, so bad I call it the anti-comedy.
Verdict: skip it
