The Pink Panther 2 (2009)

A sequel arrives eleven films deep into a franchise that has been coasting on a single animated feline and one accent for over four decades. The Pink Panther 2 assembles what the screenplay sincerely calls a Dream Team: a British detective, an Italian businessman, a Japanese technology expert, an Indian criminologist, and Inspector Clouseau, who is French and mostly a hazard. The picture intends this multinational roster as a gesture toward globalism. In practice the joke is that each member represents a nationality, and the nationality is the punchline. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan gets the most substantive role of the ensemble, and she turns out to be the villain, which is at least a promotion.

The progressive content here is thin and largely accidental. A criminologist of Indian descent runs intellectual circles around the men until she is revealed as a murderous thief, which complicates any reading of the casting as enlightened. Nicole exists to be courted, competed over, and shot at. Lily Tomlin appears periodically as an HR manners instructor who scolds Clouseau for his suggestive remarks and his prejudices, and the film treats these admonishments as a running gag rather than a position. That is the closest this production comes to a thesis, and it arrives wearing a frown and a punchline. A man in a pink ballet tutu shows up at the wedding as a forfeited bet. That is the extent of the film's engagement with anything resembling a gender or identity politics.

There is no climate anxiety, no critique of the wealthy men who hoard beautiful objects, no body-diverse casting, and no contemplation of neurodivergence. Clouseau's clumsiness is vaudeville, inherited and unexamined. The thefts span Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and the Vatican, and the film has nothing to say about any of them beyond the accents. It is a machine for slapstick, and it functions at roughly the efficiency of its own hero. We score it accordingly, with the weary precision the task demands.