Newest `Panther' Certainly Won't Grab You Like Others

Movie review

XX "Son of the Pink Panther," with Roberto Benigni, Herbert Lom, Burt Kwouk, Robert Davi, Claudia Cardinale. Directed by Blake Edwards, from a script by Edwards, Madeline Sunshine and Steve Sunshine. Everett Mall, Factoria, Grand Cinemas Alderwood, Kent, Metro, Newmark, Renton Village, Sea Tac Mall. "PG" - Parental guidance advised, because of violence, mild sex jokes. -------------------------------------------------------------------

The press kit for Blake Edwards's eighth "Pink Panther" comedy makes no reference to "Inspector Clouseau," the 1968 Bud Yorkin comedy in which Alan Arkin briefly took over for the late Peter Sellers in the role of the bumbling Jacques Clouseau.

That officially makes this the ninth installment, tying the series with "Friday the 13th," though there are no promises of a "final chapter." Unfortunately.

After a sprightly credits sequence in which the animated Pink Panther takes over conducting duties for Henry Mancini, while helping Bobby McFerrin doodle with the Panther theme Mancini composed 30 years ago, it's mostly downhill. It's been 10 years since the last "Panther" installment, yet Edwards seems exhausted.

Aside from the casting of Roberto Benigni as Clouseau's son - a goofy policeman who has inherited his father's accident-prone behavior as well as the inability to say "bump" - Edwards and his co-writers have little to add to the Panther formula but mayhem and sloppy slapstick.

At first, the body count even threatens to match the pile-up of corpses in "Friday the 13th," as chief bad guy Robert Davi (the villain in the last James Bond movie, "License to Kill") engineers the bloody kidnapping of an exotic princess named Yasmin (Debrah Farentino).

The killings seem like an act of desperation, an artificial attempt to get things moving again. So is the inexhaustible parade of in-jokes, which will mean nothing to a generation that didn't grow up with Sellers' Clouseau.

Claudia Cardinale, cast as a princess in the first "Pink Panther" 30 years ago, turns up this time as Maria Gambrelli, who was originally played by Elke Sommer in the second "Panther" movie, "A Shot in the Dark." It seems that Gambrelli and Clouseau had "a brief encounter in a blizzard," and Jacques Jr. is the result.

Also back are Herbert Lom as twitchy Commissioner Dreyfus, Burt Kwouk as Cato, and Graham Stark as "Dr. Balls."

That there are any laughs at all is due almost entirely to Benigni. He's not remotely like Sellers, but he's a creative physical comedian, as he proved in his popular Italian comedy, "Johnny Stecchino," and a pair of Jim Jarmusch's movies ("Night on Earth," "Down by Law"). And he does have a way with a "bump."