March 3, 2006

Spank the panther

We watched "The Pink Panther" yesterday (yes, the new one) and if you are thinking of watching the movie, let me save you the trouble – don’t :p It is one of the most idiotic, mind-numbing, utterly stupid and totally mindless comedies that I’ve seen in a while. I don’t think even my five year old nephew laughed at more than a few scenes. Can you say that I didn’t like the movie? Yeah, I guess you can say that …

I haven’t seen the original Peter Sellers movie and now I really feel the need to watch the original to see if it was just as bad as the Steve Martin version was or if they managed to somehow take the original, drain all the humour out of it and then serve it up as a new movie. In fact, "The Emperor’s New Groove", which I’m watching now for the fifth or sixth time because my nephew Ike loves it, seems to have more humour in it even on the sixth viewing than "The Pink Panther" did on the first.

The problem seems to be that they were just trying too hard. Steve Martin’s stupid French accent, instead of being amusing, was just annoying. Most of the jokes depended just too much on slapstick and the plot was just a bit too stupid for it to be funny. Come on, Chief Inspector Dreyfus is just as stupid as Inspector Jacques Clouseau (if not stupider) and he is supposed to have become chief of police while Clouseau stayed in obscurity? (OK, fine, maybe that one is just true to life and not stupid :p) As far as I’m concerned, most of the movie did nothing for me. The end where Clouseau has to rise against the odds and prove himself was kind of nice but then again that bit was just a predictable attempt at drumming up sympathy.

Even the cameo by Clive Owen as Agent 006 was only slightly amusing – it felt just tired and lame rather than fresh or amusing. Ah well, maybe I was just in a bad mood or maybe this was just one of those really bad movies :p

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Posted by Fahim at 9:05 am  |  1 Comment