A lot of critics dismiss slapstick as the lowest form of humor (aside from fart jokes), but it really isn't that bad. There's just a right way and a wrong way to do it. The wrong way presents you with a man walking towards a banana peel who proceeds to slip on it. The right way presents you with a man walking towards a banana peel who steps around it, thus falling into an open manhole. The Pink Panther is incapable of this sort of bait and switch.
Steve Martin has taken on the role that Peter Sellers made famous (and subsequently beat into the ground with sequels): bumbling detective Jacques Clouseau. But the humor and situations of this Pink Panther have little in common with its 30-year-old predecessors, and the few people in the audience who are still familiar with those films will have their nostalgia confined to brief bursts of the classic Henry Mancini score. At least Martin gets the outrageous French accent right, which is more than can be said for Kevin Kline's intermittent French and Henry Czerny's is-that-supposed-to-be-Russian? accent.
The film has only one joke: Inspector Clouseau is an idiot, so what do you think will happen? Inspector Clouseau is an idiot, and he's holding his boss' fountain pen, so what do you think will happen? Inspector Clouseau is an idiot, and he has to retrieve something from a pipe under the sink, so what do you think will happen? The outcome is always predictable. There's even a scene in which Clouseau inadvertently tortures someone in the hospital by pulling on the various slings holding his casts—a joke way past its expiration date.
The solution to the mystery is wholly unsatisfying, and certainly not worth the tedious onslaught of used jokes we face to get there. The Pink Panther is the lowest form of humor. Its slapstick always takes the dull, juvenile route, and when that isn't annoying enough, it throws in a few fart jokes for good measure.