Pink Panther 2 - Review

Steve Martin continues to be a revered comedy icon even 10 years after his last relevant comedy (that would be Bowfinger), but even he knew he needed some help to get anyone to accept a second remake of the classic Peter Sellers Pink Panther films. So for The Pink Panther 2, Martin stacks the deck with talented comedians and actors from across the globe. Emily Mortimer and Jean Reno are back, John Cleese has replaced Kevin Kline as Clouseau's nemesis Inspector Dreyfus, and Alfred Molina and Andy Garcia have joined as international investigators brought to France when, once again, the Pink Panther diamond is lifted. Add in Aishwarya Rai as a mysterious diamond expert, Lily Tomlin as an etiquette teacher and Jeremy Irons as a suspected culprit, and it's a cast that would make anything worth watching.

Anything except The Pink Panther 2, that is. The movie that brings together all these stars is a dull and obvious comedy that either squanders the talent of its cast or leaves them to founder within the scrambled and episodic screenplay. Decent pratfalls and physical gags will take you a long way, but there needs to be some semblance of wit and coherence to keep viewers older than 10 interested. Harald Zwart steps in for director Shawn Levy here, but his poor sense of comedic timing and lack of visual style may have only made matters worse.

When the film opens Inspector Clouseau (Martin) has been relegated to parking meter duty after winning a Medal of Honor at the end of the last film, with Dreyfus hoping to keep him out of the office and out of the way. But when the Pink Panther is stolen, along with priceless artifacts from Italy, Japan and England, Clouseau is the obvious choice to join the international Dream Team charged with recovering the items. There's a Brit (Molina), an Italian (Garcia) and a Japanese whiz kid (Yuki Matsuzaki), all of them exasperated by Clouseau's ego and clumsiness. The Italian is more interested Clouseau's secretary Nicole (Mortimer), whom he woos even while Nicole and Clouseau refuse to acknowledge their mutual crushes.

Joined by jewel expert Sonia (Rai), the Dream Team travels the globe on the trail of the mysterious thief The Tornado. Each location is essentially just a new opportunity for a Clouseau pratfall. He runs atop a giant globe in a mansion, he falls off the Pope's balcony, he burns down a restaurant in Rome. The physical gags, as tired as they may be, work a whole lot better than the French jokes, which once again find Clouseau unable to pronounce "hamburger" and, in his scenes with Tomlin, constantly ogling women. The goal seems to be to establish some kind of witty repartee among the assorted comic legends, but all the verbal scenes are draggy and obvious, making Tomlin's presence, for the first time ever, unwanted.

Mortimer brings some sparkle as the dopey and devoted Nicole, and Molina especially makes a fun opponent for Clouseau, as in one early scene where the two size each other up by lobbing random insults like "You were 14 before you learned to enjoy the taste of avocado!" Reno, though his character lurks weirdly on the sidelines for most of the film, gets a beautifully bizarre song-and-dance scene with Martin. You get the sense that, in a better movie with more ambition, the audience could be having as much fun as the stars did behind the scenes.

Once I was watching The Office on DVD, and spent 10 minutes watching deleted scenes before I realized it wasn't the actual episode. The Pink Panther 2 is pretty much the same experience, making you wonder if there's a cut of the film that doesn't linger so needlessly on Clouseau's love triangle, or leaves out the scenes (Clouseau karate fights with tweens?) that have nothing to do with the plot. But apparently Martin and Zwart really did want to make a movie this aimless and derivative, aware that their target audience of children won't know what they're missing. Would that the rest of us could be so lucky.

Ocean's Thirteen - Review

For the actors on set, the Ocean’s movies are a party. Famous people show up, hang out, and seem to have a lot of fun with each other . There’s very little acting involved, but that’s also part of the series’ genius. As the franchise wears on director Steve Soderbergh has begun to merge the public persona of his very famous actors with that of the movie’s characters. By now, in the midst of the third film, there’s very little effort at all to develop these people into anything other than themselves. You’re watching George Clooney and Brad Pitt up there, not Danny Ocean and his good buddy Rusty. It’s not that Pitt and Clooney can’t act, it’s just that for these movies, they don’t need to. For Ocean’s Thirteen, that blending of public persona and character is more complete than ever and as a result the Ocean’s franchise works better than before.

It begins without bothering to attempt an introduction. George, Brad, Matt, Bernie and the rest show up and jump right into a heist. Elderly gang member and mascot Reuben Tishkoff (Elliot Gould) has been screwed over by a vicious Vegas entrepreneur named Willie Bank (Al Pacino), sending Reuben to the sick bed and Ocean’s boys to his defense. Clooney and his gang of lovable thieves spring into action to ruin Bank, with their most complicated con yet.

Ocean’s women have been left at home for this adventure, there’s an offhand reference to Tess being unable to come in the film’s opening, and the movie is better for it. Ocean’s Thirteen is about the unbreakable bond between a group of male friends, and the lengths they’re willing to go to honor it. They’re also back in Las Vegas, the perfect place for dudes to hang out and look really, really cool. By now this group has such an easy chemistry together that all of it, seems incredibly natural. They fit together, and by cutting away a lot of the fat that plagued the previous movies Soderbergh has made more room for the easy-going chemistry of his cast to take over. Because everyone seems so natural, for the audience it becomes almost an exercise in voyeurism, as if we’re peeking in at the day to day lives of Clooney and Pitt… if they had secret second jobs as roguish master thieves.

As usual, Ocean’s is all about looking cool. Clooney looks cool, Pitt looks cool, Damon looks cool. They talk cool, they move cool, and that’s good enough. Combine that with one of the better heist plots the series has had and you have a movie that’s a lot of fun. The gang shows up, gets right into the heist, and when the heist is done so is the movie. It’s short, it’s sharp, and because Soderbergh keeps things so simple, stripped-down, and straight to the point, Ocean’s Thirteen is the best Ocean’s movie so far.