bobbyt

Movie studios are reaching into the recycle bin a lot lately. This time Pink Panther comes back with a new style and feel and a cast of known faces. When watching Pink Panther I have the feeling the comedy in this movie was written as if it was meant for a cartoon. You can tell it didn't have the impact they were going for when played out in screen with real actors. But it's this cheesy over the top gags that kept me laughing and watching it to the end. Steve Martin is doing his bad impersonation of a french detective the entire film and from the first lines that come out of his mouth you know this movie is not meant to be taken seriously. Low violence and little bad language make it a decent choice younger audiences who will find it even funnier than I did. I'm glad the studios took a chance with this film.

I'll start with the positive. Watching the facial expressions and movements of the kids was unreal. How did they get kids so young to cooperate and play out these scenes? How much of it is CG and how much is luck of the shot? Impressive if you have never seen such a thing before.

I began to watch this movie with my nephew on DVD. He definitely didn't see the rest of it. The crude dialog coming out of baby's mouths and the endless amount of foul language in the film from the adults-- including scenes in the presence of the children forced to me find something more suitable. It was just crazy. The story line that revolves around children and random jokes for kids clearly isn't aimed at adults. But the dialog is no where near suitable for kids. The other reviews go in depth about the script flaws more...

But the disappointments began before the movie even started. The first thing I noticed off the bat after hitting play was the film transfer was extremely bad. Washed out with film scratches and flaws galore. The compression on the DVD was the worst of it. I have honestly never seen such a poorly compiled DVD before. Fade to black moments in the film showed random huge purple pixels shifting at every key frame on a plain black screen. Some scenes looked soft almost to the point of being out of focus, audio was a bit over-compressed and very boomy sounding. How can a 13 million dollar film backed by tristar have this poor post production, not to mention who would pay 13 million to have this film made? Like all bad movies if you know what you're about to watch and are up for a cheesy flick it just might work. But consider this review a warning to parents and those who find mediocre quality DVDs unwatchable. Not what you'd expect to find on the shelf of a big name video rental store.

I had mixed feelings about this movie. I can't really say if I liked it or not. I was expecting a spoof movie following in the footsteps of the `Scary Movie' series based on the late 90s horror flicks. Really there was no direct mockery of the cliché spooky movie tactics. It in itself was its own type of movie. First off the movie looked great. It clearly had a decent budget and an experienced crew working on it, decent score through-out, good acting, large filming location… But why put so much money into something that was poorly written? Maybe not all that poorly written but surely quickly written. The movie was random and not in a funny way. As if 10 different people wrote 10 different sections of the film. In one part of the movie the characters dedicated a good chunk of time to trying to figure out the pattern of killings… then they just sort of gave up and decided to run around and get killed making no reference to what they figured out.

The characters were unique and funny but I think they dreamt up these characters first then just wrote the rest of the movie around them as filler so they could put them on screen. They were funny, just not horror/comedy movie material. This movie could have been hysterical if they had spent time working on a solid script rather than writing filler with random out of place sex gags. What makes up for it are the off the wall running gags such as "Peenalop" and the humping fruit. Watch this movie expecting no more than a good looking film with a few funny one liners and you could come out enjoying it more than expected.