Item: Paddington in Peru (2024)
Rating: 2.5
Author: MaryAnn Johanson

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 with 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: No Time to Die, In the Heart of the Sea) 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: Downton Abbey: A New Era, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) has disappeared… she’s gone off on a some sort of “quest,” suggests the Reverend Mother (Olivia Colman: Wicked Little Letters, The Father) in charge of the home. And so Paddington and the Browns venture off into the Peruvian Amazon in an attempt to find her. Which morphs into, rather bizarrely, a search for the lost Incan city of El Dorado and its golden riches, complete with mysterious maps and clues to be deciphered.

Paddington in Peru Hugh Bonneville Emily Mortimer Samuel Joslin Madeleine Harris Julie Walters — “The sign says ‘Welcome to Jurassic Park.’ Well, I don’t think that can be right…”

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; “darkest Peru” did the trick just as well. Here, new director Dougal Wilson — a maker of commercials and music videos with his feature debut — and new writers Mark Burton (a veteran of Aardman movies including the recent Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget) and 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 comparison with the previous movies is shocking. King’s London is, with delightful paradox, both bursting with pop-up-book magic and grounded in authenticity, and is 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.

And, of course, 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: Downton Abbey: A New Era, Breathe) spends most of the movie fretting about — are all Peru could possibly be about.

Paddington in Peru Olivia Colman — 🎶*The Home for Retired Bears is alive with the sound of music…*🎶

What irks me the most about Paddington in Peru is how lazy and generic it is, which really grates next to how abundantly, uniquely original the first two movies are. Peru 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. Yet it’s, well, bearly there; the cleverest it can muster are 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 as Mrs Brown; new-to-the-role Emily Mortimer (Good Posture, The Bookshop) is as lovely as she always is but brings a much more subdued energy than Hawkins’s 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 those nods to The Sound of Music) and clearly has a secret. Ditto Antonio Banderas (The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Finding Altamira) 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 seems intended to).

I’m not sure Paddington would find “fine” good enough, though. I think he might have a hard stare for anyone happy with “fine.”