Grade: D+

There are lots of movies that should never be remade, and there are characters that ought never to be played by people other than those who originally create them. (Can you imagine a new version of “Gone With the Wind” or “Casablanca”? Or a Rhett Butler who isn’t Clark Gable, or a Rick Blaine who isn’t Humphrey Bogart? Don’t write to tell me that David Soul once played Rick in a television series based on “Casablanca.” We know how that turned out.)

This new version of “The Pink Panther,” which has finally opened after several postponements, isn’t really a remake of the 1964 Blake Edwards diamond-heist farce that introduced the bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau–a movie that, truth be told, was hardly as good as its later reputation would have it (it’s actually pretty slow and, apart from the Clouseau sections, not very funny). This “Pink Panther” is more like one of the inferior sequels that resumed the series in the 1970s, which took Clouseau into ever more absurd slapstick situations and finally ended with the pathetic “Trail of the Pink Panther” and “Curse of the Pink Panther” in the early 1980s and the appalling “Son of the Pink Panther,” with Roberto Benigni embarrassing himself in the lead, in 1993.

And it makes the cardinal error of having another actor step into the shoes of Peter Sellers as Clouseau. That’s really been attempted only once before, by Alan Arkin in Bud Yorkin’s “Inspector Clouseau” (1968), and it didn’t work at all, despite Arkin’s considerable talent. (“Trail” and “Curse” tried to get around Sellers’ death by using outtakes rather than a new Clouseau.) Arkin strove to make the character his own by playing him quite differently than Sellers had in “Panther” and “A Shot in the Dark” (easily the best of all the earlier movies), but his deadpan take on Clouseau never clicked.

Now Steve Martin tries to succeed where Arkin didn’t, and merely proves that in this role at least, Peter Sellers is irreplaceable. Martin’s a great comic actor, and his slapstick sense has always been well-honed–it’s impossible not to admire his physical shtick in “All of Me,” for instance. At sixty, though, he’s a bit long in the tooth for pratfalls, as the recent “Cheaper by the Dozen 2” already demonstrated; indeed, one winced when Sellers, in his fifties, appeared in his last “Panther” installments too (though in his case illness make him seem very frail toward the end). The effect in Martin’s case isn’t quite as painful as watching the later efforts by The Three Stooges, or Laurel and Hardy in “Utopia,” but it’s getting into that ballpark.

The real problem with Martin’s assumption of the character, however, is that his effort to imitate the combination of prissy arrogance and blundering ineptitude that Sellers conveyed so brilliantly comes up short. Sellers was able to make it all seem effortlessly right, and even oddly endearing; with Martin, it comes across as studied and false. Partially that derives from the fact that as a performer Martin radiates intelligence, even when he’s playing a jerk–a circumstance that’s always hobbled his efforts to seem genuinely stupid on screen. As a result his Clouseau isn’t the blissfully oblivious innocent that Sellers’ was; he’s a more obnoxious, irritating figure, who grows increasingly grating as the plot grinds on. But Sellers isn’t the only person missed here. In the old movies Herbert Lom, as Clouseau’s exasperated (and eventually crazed) boss, was an equally important ingredient. His replacement, is Kevin Kline, who’s colorless by comparison, without the mischievous intensity Lom brought to the proceedings.

As to those, the plot concocted by Martin and Len Blum–involving the investigation of the murder of a soccer coach, which implicates the dead man’s girlfriend, a singer named Xania (Beyonce Knowles)–is just a hinge on which to hang a succession of slapstick episodes, many of them featuring Clouseau’s mangling of the English language and his obvious infatuation with Xania. There’s a strong similarity here to the plot of “Shot,” but nowhere near the same degree of cleverness or ingenuity. And the fact that Martin, while catching the fussiness of the character, misses the childish innocence that Sellers added to the mix (the British actor might have been a genius in his own way, but as his biography shows, he was rather a baby at heart), makes it all seem a decidedly arch exercise.

Knowles’s blankness is of no help, nor is Jean Reno as Clouseau’s drowsy assistant Ponton (who effectively replaces Sellers’ sidekick played by Graham Stark, but doesn’t match the latter’s almost elfin charm). Such talented performers as Emily Mortimer and Kristin Chenoweth, meanwhile, are stranded with little to do but react to Martin’s malapropisms and stumbling, and an extraneous gag involving Clive Owen as a James Bondish British agent is totally lame. Technically the movie isn’t terrible, but it’s certainly pedestrian, with Jonathan Brown’s cinematography failing to take much advantage of the foreign locales and George Foley Jr. and Brad E. Wilhite’s editing failing to allow the slapstick bits to build as they should.

“The Pink Panther” is directed by Shawn Levy, who previously teamed with Martin on the “Cheaper by the Dozen” remake, and they work together no better this time around. It’s not just Peter Sellers who’s sorely missed here, it’s Blake Edwards, too; The pacing isn’t merely sluggish, it positively stutters (something for which the editors must share the blame). The result is that instead of the perfectly calibrated Sellers-Edwards routines, we get hit-and-(mostly)-miss slapstick from Martin and Levy and jokes about flatulence and Viagra. Happily Henry Mancini’s theme from the 1964 picture returns, and the cartoon versions of the Pink Panther and Clouseau once again appear in the titles, always a treat. But that hardly suffices. This picture is less a homage to its predecessors than a cheap imitation of them. But at least it can’t efface fond memories of them.

D+

There’s a trenchant, funny academic novel by Don DeLillo called “White Noise.” Unfortunately, this movie isn’t based on it, but rather on an original idea by scripter Niall Johnson. In the old days before cable and satellite dishes, when we pulled down network TV with rooftop antennas, reception was always plagued by what was called ghosting–double and triple images. This supernatural thriller is about genuinely ghostly figures and voices that literally come through television screens (and radio speakers). It’s called Electronic Voice Phenomenon (or EVP)–the theory that communication from the dead reaches us embedded in the hissing and background static that’s a natural part of radio and TV broadcasts. But the picture is reminiscent the old form of broadcast “ghosting” in that it’s just too blurry, disjointed and unfocused to afford much pleasure. In the end “White Noise” will probably just serve as background filler for some heavy snoring.

Michael Keaton, doing a pleasant but undistinguished ordinary-guy turn, stars as Jonathan Rivers, an architect whose author-wife Anna (Chandra West, pretty but nondescript) is killed in what’s determined to be a tragic accident when her car swerves off a treacherous road and careens down a riverbank. The bereft widower is shortly visited by portly Raymond Price (Ian McNeice), a sedulous EVP investigator, who informs him that he’s captured Anna’s voice on his receiver and invites Jonathan to hear the message. Initially doubtful, Rivers is quickly convinced, and before long he’s become obsessed with contacting his wife again. He sets up a battery of equipment, in the process largely ignoring his job and his young son (luckily the kid’s mother–Rivers’ first wife–is around to take up the slack), and–helped by Sarah Tate (Deborah Kara Unger), who had gotten into touch with her deceased fiancé through EVP–he not only presses on but, following in Price’s footsteps, becomes a comfort to others, delivering messages that he hears from the beyond to their intended recipients. But things soon take a disquieting turn. Not only does Price die under suspicious circumstances–amid suggestions that dark forces were threatening him from the other side for meddling with EVP–but Rivers begins receiving messages from people not yet deceased (in one case heroically rescuing a young child by taking action on one of them) and is warned by a medium and by Anna that he is in danger. At this point “White Noise” morphs rather absurdly into a serial-killer movie that makes very little sense even by the extremely lax standards of the genre; and when a villain is finally revealed, he’s dragged in from so far in left field that you may even forget he’d made an earlier appearance.

Keaton and Unger make it through all the nonsense with straight faces and an impressively serious demeanor, under the circumstances, and McNeice–one of those British character actors whose face you’ll undoubtedly recognize even if you never knew his name, is suitably intense in the sort of slightly-cracked scientist role that Ian Holm used to play every few months but is now too big to take on. Director Geoffrey Sax, working closely with cinematographer Chris Seager, manages to generate some general creepiness, but never much tension or suspense, and very few scares.

“White Noise” is crammed with shots of monitor screens filled with nothing but dancing snow, and so pretty much seems a movie about poor television reception–something you can probably get for free at home, usually when your cable conks out at the most inconvenient moment. It certainly doesn’t warrant seeing on the big screen. If you’re interested, wait for it to appear on the tube–where in quality as well as content it obviously belongs. The last line delivered by Keaton in the picture is simply “I’m sorry”–words he might as well be delivering directly to the audience.