You can take the bear out of London... but why the heck would you want to do that? That's who Paddington is — a little bear in a big city, a stranger navigating a strange (to him) land. Michael Bond, who created Paddington in the 1950s and authored many books about him, never took the character far from London, and for the first two movies in this series — 2014's Paddington and 2017's Paddington 2 — cowriter and director Paul King remained true to Bond's urban fairy tale. But other than a story credit, King has not returned for this third outing, and Paddington in Peru suffers greatly from the lack of his deft whimsy.
This time, Paddington (once again charmingly voiced by Ben Whishaw) and his adoptive English family, the Browns, head to his homeland to visit his Aunt Lucy, who isn't doing too well in her Home for Retired Bears. But they arrive to find that Lucy (the voice of Imelda Staunton) has disappeared... she's gone off on a some sort of "quest," suggests the Reverend Mother in charge of the home (Olivia Colman). And so Paddington and the Browns venture off into the Peruvian Amazon in an attempt to find her. But that journey, rather bizarrely, morphs into a search for the lost Incan city of El Dorado and its golden riches, complete with mysterious maps and clues to be deciphered.
Alas that the aspect of this movie most faithful to Bond is the colonial exoticism of Paddington's latest exploits. Bond required only the suggestion of "dangerous foreignness" for his Paddington — indeed, his original idea was that the bear was from "darkest Africa" until he was informed that no bears are native to that continent, so "darkest Peru" did the trick just as well.
New director Dougal Wilson (his debut feature after making commercials and music videos) and new writers Mark Burton (Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget) and the team of Jon Foster and James Lamont (who together have written for an animated Paddington television series for very young children) give us a theme-park notion of Amazonia, colorful but flattened and flimsy. Of course this is a family adventure, not a documentary or a serious adult drama, but the drop-off compared to the previous Paddington movies is shocking. King's London was both bursting with pop-up-book magic and grounded in authenticity, a delightful paradox. It was vibrantly and diversely populated by people who are of London... including Paddington himself. But here, where Paddington is actually supposed to be from, he feels as out of place as the Browns as they all get tossed around — sometimes literally — on the cinematic equivalent of a Disney amusement ride.
Though absolute fealty to source material isn't necessary (and sometimes is ill advised), in Bond's books, Aunt Lucy's Home for Retired Bears is in Lima, a historic city of 10 million people (the second largest in South America). We could have gotten a different sort of urban fairy tale, with Paddington bringing his innocence and optimism and marmalade-fueled exuberance to a whole new band of cityfolk. But Lucy's home has been relocated to the jungle, as if treasure hunts and peculiar perils — as risk-averse insurance man Mr. Brown (Hugh Bonneville) spends most of the movie fretting about — are all Peru could possibly be about.
What's most irksome about Paddington in Peru is how lazy and generic it is. It's really grating considering how abundantly, uniquely original the first two movies are. The third entry tries too hard, right down to what feels like the irresistible impulse of franchise movies now to overexplain everything and fill in every little nugget of backstory.
It's a film that's... well... bearly there. The cleverest it can muster is cheap references to far superior movies such as The Sound of Music and Raiders of the Lost Ark (and it bashes the latter one to death). I can't help but wonder whether the huge comedown that this movie represents is why Sally Hawkins has also not returned Mrs. Brown (new-to-the-role Emily Mortimer is as lovely as she always is, but brings a much more subdued energy than Hawkinses' electric quirkiness).
Paddington in Peru is fine. It's fine. Olivia Colman is obviously having a ball as the nun, who sings and plays guitar (hence the nods to The Sound of Music) and clearly has a secret. Ditto Antonio Banderas as the riverboat captain who hosts the Brown family (though I'm not sure the "oroloco," or gold madness, he suffers from quite works as the commentary on the European plundering of the ancient Incas, and the power the El Dorado myth continues to exert, in the way it is intended to).
I'm not sure Paddington would or should find "fine" good enough, though. I think he might have a hard stare for anyone happy with "fine." ♦
Paddington in Peru
Rated PG
Directed by Dougal Wilson
Starring Ben Whishaw, Olivia Colman, Antonio Banderas
