Son of the Pink Panther: David Shea’s review

Posted by David on Oct 23rd, 2005

Funny has a color all its own

Rated PG for comic violence and some mild sensuality.

Starring Robert Benigni and some people that I was probably supposed to recognize from the previous seven movies.

Viewed 2005-10-11 by dshea, mike, dcantrell, susi, and dane

The pain and sorrow of another man can evoke many emotions: compassion, sympathy, hilarity. When it’s funny, it’s slapstick, and even the French, masters of the sad-clown-flipping-a-pancake brand of inscrutable art, are able to see how this lowbrow humor can be high class (see The Straight Dope: Do the French really love Jerry Lewis?). However, slapstick is difficult to do, and, when done poorly, it’s painful to watch. One of the more concrete rules was perhaps best expressed by Krusty the Klown, “[it's] only funny when the sap’s got dignity.”

Son of the Pink Panther is the eighth movie in the Pink Panther series. The Pink Panther movies were funny because Peter Sellers had dignity as an utter failure, which is perhaps why Blake Edwards tried to piece another movie, The Trail of the Pink Panther, together from cut footage after Sellers’ death. The seventh movie, The Curse of the Pink Panther, though the plot still centers around finding a “missing” Inspector Clouseau, no longer contains Sellers (as far as I know), instead featuring a bumbling Ted Wass as the incompetent detective and Roger Moore as Peter Sellers. The Son of the Pink Panther, though perhaps not a sequel to this winner of a story in the strictest sense, is the next offering in the series. Robert Benigni takes the lead role as Sellers’ illegitimate son, but he lacks one very important feature: dignity.

It could be that Mr. Benigni is a very funny man—I’ve never seen him in anything else to compare—but in this movie, his character is worthless. He’s cast as a bumbling nobody, not even carrying the respect of being an incompetent inspector, and not revealed as Clouseau’s son until a good way through the film. Sure, he did stupid things and people got hurt in cartoonish ways, but it just wasn’t funny. It was only predictable and tedious.

The best part of this movie was the opening credits. It was difficult to find something worth watching after the animated panther and a scatting Bobby McFerrin left the screen.