Very Cool!!!

Just so...so bad

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Like two films in one: Half silly slapstick romp, half straightforward, non-comedic (though still light-hearted) crime caper. The former boasts Peter Sellers (brilliant as always) reprising his role as the fantastically inept Inspector Clouseau. The latter features Christopher Plummer as the suave, retired jewel thief out to clear his name when he becomes prime suspect in the disappearance of the diamond of the movie's title.The Sellers half is great, with many fine, extended sight gags. But Plummer's half - while beautifully lensed on location in scenic Morocco - is sometimes exciting but too often tedious. You keep waiting to jump back to Sellers.So overall it's a mixed bag - alternately funny and slow. But Edwards remains a fine writer (he co-wrote the screenplay) and a master of composition and staging. The movie looks terrific - as does Catherine Schell as Plummer's sophisticated wife with some secrets of her own. My score card: Sellers' half rates an A. Plummer's half, C+.

Ironically, the best part of the movie isn't any of the comic scenes, but the part at the beginning depicting the elaborate way the thief gets past all the traps to steal the Pink Panther jewel. While the comic scenes with Clouseau are funny, they don't all necessarily add to the storyline. In "A Shot In The Dark", Clouseau's repeated gaffes serve to ultimately drive Commissioner Dreyfus crazy; in this movie, most of them seem to just serve as filler entertainment, such as the part where he is disguised as a hotel room cleaner and has everything go wrong when he tries to do that job.The movie's other major problem is that Christopher Plummer was a poor substitute for David Niven as the Phantom. Niven was suave and cool; Plummer was a thuggish brute who resorted to breaking bones-rather unlike how a suave cat burglar is supposed to behave.This could have been a much better movie than it was.

Picking up the role of Inspector Clouseau over a decade after A Shot in the Dark, Peter Sellers in this movie makes you wish he hadn't done something else for all that time. Though terribly plotted, The Return of the Pink Panther is filled with enough genuine hilarity that you won't really mind.The story is almost too simple. The legendary Pink Panther diamond is stolen from its home in the Middle Eastern country of Lugash, with evidence left behind implicating the almost-as-legendary jewel thief "The Phantom". The man who retrieved the diamond the first time it was stolen by The Phantom, Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers), is called into action, much to the chagrin of his dementedly frustrated boss, Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom). But it turns out that Sir Charles Litton (Christopher Plummer), the man who was The Phantom before retiring to please his young wife Claudine (Catherine Schell), is not responsible for the theft. Litton decides to head to Lugash to get to the bottom of the mystery while Clouseau is left to follow the Lady Litton to Switzerland as part of his own investigation.These Pink Panther movies are easy to review. Peter Sellers gives one of the greatest slapstick performances in cinema history as Clouseau, but there's not much else here. This one is essentially split in two, with Christopher Plummer doing a fairly good impersonation of Roger Moore, if James Bond were an international jewel thief, and Sellers just left to his own devices as Catherine Schell does little more than laugh at Clouseau's antics. Things are spiced up a bit with Herbert Lom's twitchy portrayal of Dreyfus' decent into madness over the colossal incompetence of his subordinate.I haven't the slightest idea why Blake Edwards thought anyone cared about Sir Charles Litton as much as Clouseau and while Edwards has his virtues as a storyteller, a sharp sense of pacing isn't one of them. This movie has a bloated and slack feel to it. Sellers is also noticeably less spry in the mid 70s than he was in the mid 60s.None of it matters all that much, because The Return of the Pink Panther has more than enough laughs, particularly Clouseau's battles with his manservant Cato (Burt Kwouk) and an epic struggle of Man vs. Lamp. This is a funny, family-friendly movie you should definitely watch with your kids when they're little.

Where Blake Edwards was once a handler of comedies combining slapstick, sophisticated wit, melancholia and social criticism, which was nearly forgotten by the time he's sold out this far into the eponymous franchise, because this one is just slapstick. Nothing else. He's mostly celebrated as the creator of the Pink Panther series. But this one's problem is how it drags. There isn't any anticipation felt or even created, any comic anguish, that nearly Hitchcockian suspense where time suddenly dilates to allow a burst of laughter.Other than the usual homage to the silent cinema of Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Leo McCarey, the Clouseau films seem to reveal preoccupations that come up again and again in Edwards' work. Clouseau is very much a hysterical white male and much of the series' humor comes from the ludicrous gap between his presumptions of cultural superiority and his idiotic behavior. He feels free to treat his Asian manservant Cato brutally, and proclaims his mastery over women, yet he is spectacularly inept at everything he attempts and is constantly humiliated. Clouseau's humiliations are particularly evident in a subtext of the films involving his predominant sexual embarrassment and failure.An elaborately original cartoon throughout the opening credits gets this amusingly distracting movie off to a lighthearted start before the bungling Inspector is asked by an Arab government to help them trace the Pink Panther diamond, which has been stolen from their theoretically impenetrable national museum. Clouseau deems the burglary to be the graft of Sir Charles Litton, a.k.a. The Phantom. To facilitate his own protection, the cunning Litton embarks on his own to recover the offender while his wife Claudine deflects Clouseau.The action is not so much a slapstick aficionado's ice cream castle as a slapstick aficionado's house of Cheetos. Our inelegant star is disengaged by defective vehicles, a telephone, a doorbell, revolving doors, a vacuum cleaner, a lamp, a parrot, and the exceedingly fanatical Cado who is provided with secret hiding places and surprise Kung Fu assaults. The sight gags come on like lightning and frantically, but the story line flies in several directions at once, where the original Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark were methodically clever caper plots constructed out of their slapstick scenarios. Return of the Pink Panther is constructed right in synch with the brain's most rudimentary wavelengths, which is perhaps why it's a good house of Cheetos, a vegging-out flick.