Return Of The Pink Panther

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Following the huge box office success of the Clouseau revival The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), Edwards and co-writer Frank Waldman took their broadening of Dreyfus to its logical extreme, turning him into a madman bent on killing Clouseau, and, while he's at it, world domination. As a result, they push everything else to the extreme, too. The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), the first sequel with a patently senseless title, is little more than a gag-fest, and the hit-to-miss ratio is just positive enough to render the film an agreeable bit of foolishness.

The plot has Dreyfus kidnapping a brilliant scientist, Dr. Fassbender (Richard Vernon), whom he forces to build a laser beam that can make whole buildings disappear (once its built, they do a successful test run on the U.N.). Clouseau, now the highly regarded Chief Inspector, is charged with finding the missing professor and stopping Dreyfus, thus playing into his former superior's hands, since the loon has hired a number of the world's greatest assassins to knock off his hopelessly dim nemesis. Of course, these killers don't stand a chance, and, indeed, they're the ones who wind up getting snuffed out due to Clouseau's cosmic good fortune.

Because the film manages enough laughs, one doesn't mind the thorough ineptitude of the plotting (it's all as meaningless as any of the Austin Powers movies). The best bits find Clouseau laying waste to a living room while questioning the professor's help, as well as the obligatory Cato brawl, which is bizarrely punctuated by a left-field Hunchback of Notre Dame gag. This entry also features the best animated opening credit sequence, in which the Pink Panther pops up in a variety of classic film moments. They should've stopped with this one, but it was the most successful installment yet.

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