Pink Panther 2

I caught this in Leominster on its first afternoon of release, the day before I left for New York.

Seeing this movie had a little extra bit of personal significance for me, because it brought me back to some formative childhood memories. When I was ten years old, my family lived next to a shopping mall in Iowa. The mall had a twin movie theater, and I would often go over there by myself to see movies, especially during the summer months.

One of the movies I remember seeing from that time was The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), a sequel to the original 1963 The Pink Panther, before they rebooted the series in 2006 with Steve Martin. It absolutely blew me away. I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I went to see it twice (the first time I ever remember seeing a movie more than once), and told my parents to see it, which they did.

That being said, I wasn't expecting any magic this time around. I had not seen the 2006 remake, so I didn't have any real expectations at all. In that regard, I was not let down.

The plot was lightweight and watchable, but it didn't have much that made it interesting. As far as humor, it wasn't even in the same league as the 1975 movie (which I have not seen since then, for fear that I will find that I don't like it anymore).

What really stuck out to me is how much the Clouseau character has changed. Sellers' Clouseau was a bumbling outcast, to be sure, but he was intrepid and impeccable. He just kept going forward towards his goal, without any crippling neuroses. Moreover, his impeccability was portrayed as making him studly. At the end of the 1976 sequel, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, he gets seduced by the voluptuous Leslie Anne Warren Down (although things go awry). The idea that a braniac nerd like Clouseau could land a woman like her, just by being his true self, was an idea that appealed to an introvert like me.

The 2009 Steve Martin version has washed away all that completely. Clouseau is no longer free of neuroses but consumed by them. He is now like the shy junior high school kid that I became, afraid to talk to girls and cringing at the idea of expressing his feelings. The old Clouseau never even had time to think about such things. Now it seems it is what consumes him most. It is a wonder he had time to solve any mysteries in the movie.

Moreover the woman who supposedly is turned on by him this time around turned out to have ulterior motives. Was her desire for real? This is our dogma of the new millennium: no attractive woman shows sexual interest to a man unless he is a rich or a rock star, or unless she has some devious reason to deceive him. Everyone else is just supposed to whimper to their therapist.

Such a sad, sad result, but at this point I expected nothing else from this movie. Typical Hollywood. I hope they are done making sequels to this reboot of the series. I don't want to see any more.