This is the third of the Sellers Pink Panther movies I've watched with my sons, though my older boy (Thing 1) took to running away during large parts of this movie, for reasons I wasn't entirely able to understand. (I mean, he missed a lot of the really funny stuff!)Revenge of the Pink Panther has no connection to the previous movie, The Pink Panther Strikes Again; Herbert Lom's Chief Inspector Dreyfuss is still institutionalized as Revenge begins, and not a dead invisible world-conqueror. (Would that more movie series were willing to go that route -- it's generally just the set-up that we really care about, anyway.) So this is a completely independent sequel to The Return of the Pink Panther, or perhaps an alternative to Strikes Again.
Sellers's bits of physical comedy and tomfoolery are better integrated into the plot than in Revenge (where he seemed to be in an entirely different movie than the main plot), and the storyline is less silly than in Strikes Again (though, as one of my sons said near the end, Revenge ends up a lot like a James Bond movie, only funny). It's funny, and only moderately dated -- particularly with an extended drag bit in the first half -- which is what one should look for in a thirty-year-old comedy.
I greatly recommend this, and the previous two '70s Pink Panther films, to tween boys, and any other audiences with tastes for comedy that approximate those of boys -- it's broad, and slapstick, and just the right amount of silly.
No comments:
Post a Comment