Inspector Clouseau Reviews

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from the damned thing but I was planning to watch all the Clouseau films so I still wanted to check this one at some point. Well, as expected, the damned thing turned out to so misguided. Basically, after the successful ‘The Pink Panther’ and ‘A Shot in the Dark’, they didn’t exactly rush to come up with a 3^rd instalment starring the famous French inspector and, at some point, both Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers declined to participate. For Alan Arkin, it was such a bad decision that it could have completely derailed his promising career who just had started a few years before. However, Arkin was definitely not the biggest problem here and, at least, he did try to give his own spin on this iconic character (like Steve Martin would try almost 40 years later) but it was still weird to see Clouseau being played by someone else than Peter Sellers. A bigger issue beside the fact that pretty much all the jokes were rather lame was that the whole thing was just so poorly put together. For example, at some point, Clouseau went to visit a convict in prison called Addison Steele. At some point, Steele managed to put Clouseau to sleep with some chloroform and to hide in some box and then… well, actually nothing happened afterwards. Indeed, they then switched to a completely different scene involving Clouseau visiting a colleague from Scotland Yard with some fancy gadgets and, at no point, they actually acknowledged what happened in the previous scene. Later on, you did get to see Steele involved with his gangster colleagues so you might  assume that he managed to escape somehow but it gives you an idea of how terribly clumsy the whole thing was. Anyway, to conclude, I always thought that the Pink Panther movies involving Steve Martin were terrible but this movie was maybe even worse and you should pretty much avoid the damned thing.