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Reviews
The Pink Panther (2006)
Just not funny.
This film is just not funny at all. This movie could only be considered funny by people whose expectations have been beaten down my the poor, meager offerings Hollywood labels as "comedies" these days. The only part that's close to funny is the scene with the accent trainer, and you saw that in the preview. So please give your precious box office dollars to a film that actually deserves them, secure in the knowledge that you're not missing anything amusing.
Jean Reno is fun to watch. Emily Mortimer does well with the most threadbare of roles. Everyone else is phoning it in. Kevin Kline is painful to watch - not because of the character's frustration, but because the character is so ill-conceived.
The "jokes," both physical and verbal, are laborious, forced and flat. I'll say it again - there are no laughs in this movie. There's no life, nothing that offers evidence of a sense of humor. There are a couple jokes based on ideas that had potential, but the filmmakers' laziness and ineptitude rendered them predictable and boring. I expected better from Steve Martin. I did not expect better from Shawn Levy, and the flaccidity and lifelessness of his direction did not surprise me.
Clearly no one involved with this production grasped what made the franchise popular in the first place. It's almost as though they never saw the two or three really good ones. You don't have to have Peter Sellers or Herbert Lom or Blake Edwards to make a funny Pink Panther movie. But you have to get it the way they did. A film of this type will only work if it emerges organically from the participants' own senses of humor. These people just didn't get it. They wear these characters like ill-fitting garments stolen from an estate sale. It certainly is not necessary to have seen or appreciated any of the earlier films in order to recognize that this production is a paltry, disingenuous and hollow waste of time.
This film is just plain Not Funny. With every lame "comedy" like this that Steve Martin associates himself with ("Cheaper by the Dozen" comes to mind), my respect for him diminishes considerably. At this point there's not much left. I think he's played himself out. If this is the best he can do, and if he's actually pleased with this movie, I wish he'd hang it up. He's a mere shadow of his former genius.
Avoid this movie unless your standards are so low they can't even be thought of as standards. I rated it a 2 solely on the strength of Jean Reno's presence.
Fever Pitch (1997)
Unlikable characters, underdeveloped story, disappointing film
I've liked other movies based on Nick Hornby books (High Fidelity, About a Boy). I saw the American "Fever Pitch" before I discovered it was a Nick Hornby story, and I thought that movie was pretty tepid, so I got the British version starring Colin Firth. I thought I would be in for a treat, but the movie was seriously lacking.
I mainly felt that the two main characters were both thoroughly unlikable. I could not see any reason why these two people fell in love. We were given few (I'm hard pressed to remember even one) scene in which they were not bickering, nagging or generally disrespecting each other. There was no chemistry between the two of them, and neither character's personality seemed to benefit from contact with the other person. It seemed absolutely false to me. Paul seemed to have no capacity to enjoy life at all, even when Arsenal was doing well. Sarah ceaselessly nagged Paul about aspects of his personality that she was well aware of before they got together. They were both uninteresting and charmless. I normally like Colin Firth, but his big soulful eyes were not enough to carry this character.
It also felt as though the movie had been cut down from a longer runtime. There were awkward progressions from scene to scene and elements that were partially developed, then abandoned. In a montage near the end, Paul and Sarah are seen frolicking together, but it happens in the midst of a time when they are separated. Indeed, the very next time Paul encounters Sarah at school, he coldly greets her with a perfunctory "Ms. Hughes." It doesn't make sense.
The film cheaps out on the football action - I can't think of a single shot of pro football that was filmed for this movie. The only time we see actual football (apart from the kids games and an amateur match) are on TV. There were times when I expected the camera to cut to the on-field action, but it never did. The net result is that the movie feels cheap and under-imagined.
Hornby is credited with writing the screenplay for this film, and I don't think he did a particularly good job of adapting his talents to the medium. I also think the directing was mediocre. A good director could have helped the production overcome the problems this film suffers from, but the direction here seemed limited to a workmanlike effort to cover the action and nothing more.
I guess I'll have to read the book to get a good experience with this story. This film is seriously disappointing.