Joanna Lumley coming out of a Mud Bath. Roger Moore or Turk Thrust II. Joanna Lumley coming out of a Mud Bath. Leslie Ash - Kung Fu Queen. Joanna Lumley coming out of a Mud Bath.

When legendary Inspector Clouseau goes missing, New York police officer Clifton Sleigh is enlisted to find him. But Sleigh turns out to be the only detective in the world more incompetent than Clouseau himself. Traveling to France, Sleigh bumbles his way into and out of trouble, while encountering a number of characters from Clouseau's past, including the charismatic jewel thief Charles Litton and his womanising nephew, George........After the death of Sellers, Edwards probably wanted to reap the legacy of his death by rushing out turgid sequels to arguably Sellers most memorable cinematic character. And unlike the previous one, where we had recycled footage of Sellers from deleted scenes and used footage from previous movies, we had a special guest star laying the famous Clouseau in an extended cameo toward the the end.And this is the only reason why I, and I fear many others,wanted to see the film, for Roger Moore's wonderfully terrible French accent, and sending himself up like never before.After all, the man was Bond at the time, and took a day off filming Octopussy to do this favour for Edwards.And honestly, it's the only reason to watch this poor excuse of a movie, Moore is hilarious and others around him in the scene know this, because half the time you can see that they just want to laugh. But the scene only lasts for around five minutes, so you have to get through ninety minutes of Wass trying to upstage Sellers, Lom looking embarrassed, Niven being disgracefully dubbed, and TV favourite Leslie Ash totally out of her depth.The story makes no sense, it feels like a lot of dodgy sketches tied together to make an incoherent story, and it all feels like they are all doing it to get a decent holiday.The franchise died when Sellers passed, but some greedy studio head just won't let a soul rest.But Moore is hilarious...

The unexpected death of Peter Sellers put the wildly popular Pink Panther series into production limbo, but producer Blake Edwards tried to re-start things with this entry. Ted Wass is introduced as a new bumbling detective, this time from New York, now on the trail of the missing Clouseau. Various factions each have their own reasons for wanting him to fail in his search and send their top agent to thwart him. Most of the movie is taken up by Wass' bungling misadventures as he runs afoul of one agent after another. Some of these clashes result in entertaining moments, but after a while it all gets pretty episodic and rambling. Moreover the approach seems very sloppy and throwaway, as if 'take one' was used for every scene. The tight direction and sharp comic timing that characterized the early Sellers movies are largely absent, as are the expected elaborately staged, extended comedy-stunt ballets that also figured prominently earlier in the series. Perhaps the budget on this one was lower than usual and the producers tried to hide this by not getting too ambitious at any point. Fans of the series are sure to be disappointed.

While this is not quite the train wreck that TRAIL OF THE PINK PANTHER was, it's still a pretty weak entry in the PANTHER series. Ted Wass is bland and ineffectual; when I watch him here I keep thinking of how much better this movie could have been if most of his scenes were acted or directed differently. One of the few times he made me laugh was when he was doing the voice for his "instant companion."The "new Clouseau" at the end was an interesting touch -- not convincing, exactly, but funny.In hindsight, if Blake Edwards really wanted to wrap up the series after Sellers' death, I think it would have been better if he combined the "using deleted Sellers scenes" concept from TRAIL with the "searching for Clouseau" concept from CURSE into just one movie, and left it at that.