Starring: Steve Martin, Jean Reno, Kevin Kline, Beyonce Knowles
Cert: PG
Released: 17th March 2006

The French National Football team manager (Jason Statham) has been killed and his diamond ring - The Pink Panther - has gone missing. All of this happening at the climax of an important cup game in front of millions of witnesses around the globe.

Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Kline) is eager to solve the case but more for career and political reasons rather than for justice. His plan is to call in and promote a small village's incompetent gendarme, Clouseau (Martin), to head the case, muck it up and draw all media attention toward him. This would allow Dreyfus to solve the crime, unhindered, in the background and be rewarded for saving the day.

Clouseau is given an assistant (Reno) to show him around (and report back to Dreyfus) while he investigates the key suspects: the fiancée (Knowles) and the entire French national football team.

I'll save you the tirade. The lecture on the desecration of classic comedy for the sake of a quick buck. I'll try to be objective as I possibly can.

Steve Martin is Satan and he should be destroyed. He claims to be a fan of the original franchise as portrayed by Peter Sellers from 1963 to 1978 in five cracking films. Thereafter it spawned a few sequels (Son of … with Roberto Benigni, Inspector Clouseau with Alan Arkin,  Trail of … and Curse of …) all of which have received critical slatings. Why Martin thought he was up to the job is beyond me.

Going for the option of a prequel - ie, how Gendarme Clouseau got to become Inspector - is an easy out and for me to criticise Martin's relative age of his version to that of Sellers' would be semantics but he does look utterly ridiculous with his white hair and wispy black moustache. His accent would embarrass Gordon Kaye would he have to listen to it - it's an accent that verges on racism in the first place but given an extra 'comedy boost' of having an impediment as well. His comedic performance looks like he's been receiving lessons from Leslie Nielsen in that it's all so obvious an over the top. Sellers was such an understated performer which made Clouseau more believable. He wasn't a caricature of a Frenchman just a man who happened to be French. And when Seller's made us laugh at his accent it wasn't because, 'Oh, don't the French talk funny,' but because the way others on screen reacted to it.

The plot is utterly devoid of merit; the characters have been slapped together lazily. Dreyfus has less policing ability than Clouseau who, at the end of everything, turns out to be just a misunderstood deductive genius. What the hell was Jason Statham thinking? He doesn't even have any lines!

But it is was as I sit there seething in a mire of self-indulgent cynicism and self-righteousness that I distracted my attention from the desecration in front of me to take a moment to listen to a rather odd noise coming from around me. People were actually laughing at this pap? What? Are they clinically stupid or something?

No, they are children who have probably never heard of the name Clouseau before and more likely have never heard of Peter Sellers let alone seen him in action. And, yes, I even hear the laughter of those children's parents and I excuse them for getting into the spirit of things by riding the waves of their offsprings' merriment.

Pratfalls, fart jokes and mild xenophobia are a fine recipe for playground humour and since there's no violence, bonking or swearing then it's an absolute must for the 'family entertainment' market (the more naïve the better). The producers are not only trying to cash in on an established market but also on the fact that there really isn't any plain, nice films out there for a family to share and that there is a worldwide market of ignorance to the history of the far superior original characterisation.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not excusing this sacrilegious, whore mongering in the guise of entertainment but if there is a plus point to come from the irretrievable waste of 2 hours of my life then it's my new found adamancy to ensure my offspring are properly educated by buying the original DVD box set. That way, should they wish to see this heinous flogging of a dead horse of Martin's beleaguered career, then they too can sit amongst the sheeplike throngs of bleating masses in a mire of self-indulgent cynicism and self-righteousness.

I sincerely hope to any god that they won't ever want to watch as it would only be marked as validation to Martin to carry out his plans to continue defiling the memory of a true comedy genius with a sequel.