The good news is that “The Pink Panther” isn’t as bad as might have been expected – or as bad as most remakes and recastings of classic movies turn out to be. The bad news is that it still isn’t very good.

Steve Martin can be a funny guy, but he’s no Peter Sellers and should never have agreed to co-write and star in a sort of remake – technically a prequel – of “The Pink Panther.” Nor is he Phil Silvers, but that didn’t stop him from messing around with “Sergeant Bilko” a few years ago, to even more disastrous results.

What is it that makes Mr. Martin want to keep matching himself against such comic geniuses – and not just comic geniuses but men who have created, as he has not, unforgettable comic characters that will always be associated with their names? This is perhaps a matter for his psychiatrist, but a child could have told him that “The Pink Panther” was a mistake.

Actually, that’s just it. The new “Panther” is a movie for the dimmer sort of children who can’t tell the difference between an immortal comic creation like Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau and Mr. Martin’s pale imitation.

The difference, in case they want to know, is between a comic character – like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp or W.C. Fields’s bank dick or Laurel and Hardy in their screen personae – and a comedian with an array of gags in his box of tricks but no character to hold any interest apart from the gags.

Mr. Martin’s most unforgivable bit of tampering with the classic prototype of his character is to make him smart. Or rather, to make him smart and dumb. First he’s dumb. So dumb that he’s even dumber than Sellers’s Clouseau. So dumb that he makes a sack of stones look smart.

But then he gets smart in the end, instead of merely lucking into his success – which only makes the caricature more offensively false.

Mr. Martin, his co-writer Len Blum (“Private Parts”), and his director Shawn Levy’s (“Cheaper by the Dozen,” “Cheaper by the Dozen 2”) lack of interest in such a glaring inconsistency in character only underscores their ignorance of the material they’re working with.

Clouseau’s stupidity is his very essence – and not only his stupidity but the desperation with which he constantly has to hide it. Mr. Martin’s Clouseau is too stupid even to know he’s stupid. Except when he’s smart.

Nor is there any logic or attempt at plausibility in the transitions between the stupid and the smart Clouseaux. The guy who’s saying in one scene that it’s quite a coincidence that a dead body fell exactly into the chalk outline around it is replying quite wittily in the next to Clive Owen in an uncredited cameo as “Nigel Boswell, Agent 006.” When Mr. Owen asks if he knows what his title means, Mr. Martin’s Clouseau replies: “Yes, that you are one short of the big time.”

Yet this is a guy who is too dumb to know that “good-cop-bad-cop” normally requires two cops at a minimum or that a man’s greeting his killer by saying, “It’s you!” doesn’t mean that he should round up everyone in Paris with the name “You.”

By the time the usually reliable Kevin Kline, who gets no traction with the Herbert Lom role as Chief Inspector Dreyfus, tells him he is a “hopeless, deluded idiot,” we find it difficult to respond, as the music tells us we are supposed to, with sympathy for the idiot on account of the blow to his self-esteem. “You mean I wasn’t promoted because of my merits?”

Oh, come off it! There’s no reason left for thinking that this could possibly have come as a shock to him, or that he could have felt hurt if it did. And then to turn around and show this idiot working out for himself the identity of the killer and the whereabouts of the missing diamond, the eponymous jungle feline, just to show old Dreyfus how mistaken he was, is the height of absurdity.

In other words, there is no attempt to make anything about this movie look like reality, which is not quite the same thing as a merely unbelievable movie like the original “Pink Panther” (1963) or “A Shot in the Dark” (1964) – the film that was actually the first in the series, though it was released second. Those pictures still had a tether to reality, which was enough for Sellers to build his comic creation on. This “Pink Panther” is just an excuse for jokes and pratfalls.

As I have suggested, some of the jokes are funny, sort of. I especially liked the one where, in a classic detective story move, Clouseau picks up a ringing telephone on the desk of a suspect before the suspect can get it, sure the voice on the other end will give him valuable information about the man’s criminal connections – and then proceeds to converse with a telemarketer for cell phone service. “I think I just got a good deal!” he announces triumphantly.

But such isolated laughs are not enough to save the picture, or for us to forgive Steve Martin for undertaking roles so far in excess of his capacities.

jbowman@nysun.com