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The Pink Panther 2

• Directed by Howard Zwart
• Written by Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber and Steve Martin
• Starring Steve Martin, John Cleese and Emily Mortimer
• Classification: PG
• 

Another Steve Martin comedy, the same old question — what happened? As everyone knows, Martin appears to have undergone a humour transplant around the time of Father of the Bride (1991). The comic surrealist who Pauline Kael once described as "like a man who's being electrocuted and getting a dirty thrill out of it," tuned his instrument down to a drone and started making a series of lucrative but tepid family comedies. There have been flashbacks of genius since then — he was the best thing about Tina Fey's Baby Mama — to taunt us with the career that might have been.

Well, time to move over, old-timers. The new fans — who, judging by The Pink Panther 2, are pre-teenagers — have grown up with Cheaper by the Dozen and Bringing Down the House, are unlikely to approach PP2 with downwardly adjusted expectations. Martin's second outing as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the long-running comedy franchise is targeted at a family audience, meaning children and their tagalong parents. The middling franchise reboot Pink Panther (2006) earned a whopping $160-million (U.S.) at the box office. Though that film's director, Sean Levy, has been traded in for Harald Zwart ( Agent Cody Banks), the plan here is more of the same.

The movie includes a big, likeable cast, including Martin, John Cleese (reprising Kevin Kline's role as the irascible Inspector Dreyfus) with supporting work from Emily Mortimer as Clouseau's love-struck assistant and Jean Reno as his patient partner. New additions include Lily Tomlin, Alfred Molina, Andy Garcia and Bollywood star, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. Each of them get a couple of scenes of screen time, though you end up wishing to see more from fewer of them, particularly Reno and Molina.

The sketch of a plot concerns a mysterious thief called Tornado, who steals such treasures as the Magna Carta, the Shroud Of Turin, the Japanese emperor's sword. When an international "dream team" of crime investigators is formed, international authorities demand that it be led by Clouseau, despite the wishes of Inspector Dreyfus, who has assigned Clouseau to parking cop duties.

Before Clouseau can join the dream team, Tornado strikes again, stealing the famous French jewel, the Pink Panther. The team convenes in central Paris, with Vicenzo (Garcia) from Italy, Pepperidge (Molina) from England, and Kenji (Yuki Matsuzaki) from Japan. (Tomlin, who last worked with Martin in All of Me, is wasted in a few underwritten scenes as Clouseau's political-correctness teacher.) The team is joined by Sonia (Rai Bachchan), an expert on Tornado, and a throwback to the old Pink Panther sidekick hotties such as Elke Sommer and Claudia Cardinale. The gang heads off to Rome, for encounters with a rich English jewel fence (Jeremy Irons) and the Pope (Eugene Lazarev).

The story, of course, is a line on which to pin the comic set-pieces, and that's where Pink Panther 2 comes up lustreless. Zwart has no discernible sense of comic rhythm, beyond managing to punctuate scenes with a wall crashing in. The Clouseau accent and tortured malapropisms should be incidental, not the focus of the humour. To analyze what makes mispronunciation funny or not brings comedy down to a microscopic level, but the effects are unmistakable: When Peter Sellers's Clouseau said "mith" for "moth" in A Shot in the Dark (1964), it was gourmet comedy, while Martin's "hamburger" as "hamburgleragh" feels, appropriately, like cheap comic filler.

The star is much better with physical comedy. There's a deft Chaplinesque sequence, when Clouseau knocks over a huge wine rack in a restaurant and races to keep the bottles from crashing to the floor. In another scene, in the same restaurant, he disguises himself as a masked, bow-legged flamenco dancer, clomping between tables and waving his behind in the diners' faces, where you're reminded of the absurd audacity that was once Martin's forte. As you watch him, you want to whisper to any kid sitting near you in the theatre, "There. That's the guy we were telling you about."