Metacritic reviews

Benigni isn't the brilliant comic actor Sellers was but this Italian star (also seen in Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law and Night on Earth) is a genuine clown whose ability to flail his limbs as if possessed by a Slinky makes him a rich comic lead.

Benigni is no Peter Sellers, but the inanity of the film isn't really his fault. He tries hard, and his rubbery willingness to absorb any punishment and come up looking as if he's just swallowed a very cold carp isn't without comic potential. But he is continually betrayed by the lame setups.

As the movie accelerates out of control into a series of frantically intercut scenes that lack basic continuity, the fun turns into a collection of abrupt non sequiturs.

Each new installment has become like a visit with old friends who are often annoying and frequently boring, but are missed in some strange way when they're not around.

The one thing Edwards did right this time was to cast comic actor Roberto Benigni -- a big star in Italy -- as the illegitimate son of Jacques Clouseau, the accident-prone French detective who first appeared on the screen in The Pink Panther nearly 30 years ago. Benigni is enormously charming, a slight little fellow with a homely face that seems almost puppetlike and a flair for broad physical comedy.

Son of the Pink Panther isn’t an unwatchable mess like 1982’s Curse of the Pink Panther; it trots along quickly with series veterans like Herbert Lom adding needed class. But there’s a void at the center of this film about Inspector Clouseau’s long-lost son, and its name is Roberto Benigni. Where Peter Sellers’ Clouseau had a blissfully out-of-it officiousness, the Italian comedian’s sole shtick is to beam idiotically. He’s that ruinous oxymoron: an unsurprising clown.

This series ran out of steam long ago, and director Blake Edwards hasn't exactly rung in a new era by casting Italian superstar comic Roberto Benigni in the title role. He seems to have caught the director's lassitude: He's frenetic in a charmless, groggy way. His squiggly mimetic movements don't add up to a character, just a conceit.

Starring Italian comedian Roberto Benigni as the new bumbling inspector, it is a tired pastiche of recycled sketches and gags.

The movie is frantic in fits and starts, but still remarkably tedious for such a slapstick comedy. It expends an astounding amount of time and energy setting up both its jokes and physical comedy routines, many of which are tired, watered-down iterations of material done better by Sellers.

Poor Roberto Benigni, the Italian comedian who has been given the unenviable assignment of filling the shoes in which Peter Sellers stumbled so effectively. In Son of the Pink Panther, Benigni works from a real dung heap of a script.