The Pink Panther (2006)
Directed by Shawn Levy
When the coach of the France football team is killed by a poisoned dart in the stadium at the end of a game, and his huge, expensive ring with the Pink Panther diamond disappears, the ambitious Chief Inspector Dreyfus assigns the worst police inspector – Jacques Clouseau – to the case.
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What critics compared The Pink Panther to
Disc 1, whose menu screens hilariously evoke those of the Star Wars DVDs, additionally features a semi-forced trailer for The Pink Panther (the Steve Martin incarnation), an option to view Spaceballs at "ludicrous speed," and an eminently skippable film-length commentary from Brooks and a silent Ronny Graham.
The major find of "Splice" is the breathtaking work of Delphine Chanéac (2006's " The Pink Panther "), as Dren.
Laird is a dunderhead who adorns his gaudy mansion with paintings of copulating animals and pays his assistant (Keegan-Michael Key) to attack him randomly (a la Cato from The Pink Panther).
Even a running gag involving Laird's guru Gustav (Keegan-Michael Key) that's straight out of "The Pink Panther" only shows how funny Peter Sellers was.
“Your mah-justee, I ‘ave come to describe fer yew yeur end days,” he drawls, sounding like the direct ancestor of Pepé Le Pew, The Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau, and at least three characters from the sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo .
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Shawn Levy, who directed such lucrative disasters as the Steve Martin remakes of The Pink Panther and Cheaper by the Dozen , has been brought in by Steven Spielberg to make this conflation of The Champ (the 1931 tearjerker about a drunken boxer redeemed by his long-estranged son, Jackie Cooper) and Rollerball , the futuristic action flick built around a violent popular sport.
Director Shawn Levy, whose box-office hits give critics meltdowns (Cheaper By the Dozen, The Pink Panther, both Night at the Museum movies), puts frisky energy into the fights, especially when Charlie and son take a junk-pile robot named Atom and build him into a contender.
However, the biggest failing of "Real Steel" is that director Shawn Levy, the auteur of such cinematic classics as "A Night at the Museum" and the remakes of "Cheaper by the Dozen" and "The Pink Panther," completely fails at presenting us with a vision of the near-future that is even remotely convincing--one where, to judge by the ordinariness of the surroundings, there appears to have been no other technical innovations of note other than the rapid advancement in giant ass-kicking robot technology, one where, to judge by the astonishment that the shadow function inspires, in which the Wii never existed and one where, to judge by all the blatant product placement shots of it being guzzled by the little brat, Dr. Pepper apparently emerged as the surprise victor of the cola wars.
Levy ups the drama at the expense of the laughs but generally brings the same frantic, family-friendly elements to this film, which won over audiences with his past works, A Night at the Museum (2006) and The Pink Panther (2006).
Levy, as you may already know if you are an unhappy person with bad luck, is the director of, actually, a hell of a lot of things, but some of the most noteworthy are Night at the Museum and its tar-sucking sequel ; the distasteful remake of Cheaper by the Dozen ; and the ball-shriveling remake of The Pink Panther .
While the film recognizes this dynamic and wisely turns it into a joke—the two engage in a knock-down-drag-out fight more reminiscent of The Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau and his similarly named marital arts wielding Cato—the two men share little to no chemistry beyond the oft repeated jokes implying an embryonic homosexual relationship.
Curiously, the "boys will be boys" tussle between the two reminded me of another Cato - the one from The Pink Panther movies.
It's a shame you know him only as the anything-for-a-buck Hollywood hack from remakes of The Out-of-Towners, Cheaper by the Dozen and The Pink Panther.
It’s like a commercial cousin to the recent Inherent Vice , riffing on Black’s own Lethal Weapon , as well as such diverse fare as Paper Moon , The Long Goodbye and The Pink Panther , while the presence of Kim Basinger leads to a fitting reunion with her LA Confidential love interest Crowe.