By Sandra Hall
PADDINGTON IN PERU ★★★
(PG) 106 minutes
There’s trouble in Windsor Gardens – unacknowledged, stoically borne trouble, but trouble nonetheless. Mr Brown is preoccupied with problems at work. Daughter Judy’s mind is on her imminent departure for university and her brother, Jonathan, spends most of his time in his room, communing with his computer. Mrs Brown is sad, convinced the family is coming apart and she’s the only one to notice.
Paddington in Peru sends the much-loved bear home on a mission to find his missing aunt.
The single joyful member of the family is the Browns’ adopted Peruvian bear, Paddington. He has just received a British passport, an event prompting the neighbours to present him with a top-class London umbrella by way of celebration.
So begins the third film in the Paddington franchise, and it’s very different from the earlier ones, which concentrated on the bear’s comic misadventures as a London newcomer. It takes the whole Brown family to Peru. After Paddington gets a telephone call from the Home for Retired Bears telling him his beloved Aunt Lucy is behaving strangely and is missing him a lot, he immediately decides to set off and Mrs Brown announces that the whole family will go with him. It will be a bonding exercise.
Mr Brown (Hugh Bonneville), Mrs Brown (Emily Mortimer), Jonathan (Samuel Joslin), Judy (Madeleine Harris) and Mrs Bird (Julie Walters) in Peru.
There have been a couple of changes since 2017, when the last film was released. Emily Mortimer has replaced Sally Hawkins as Mrs Brown and the children are now teenagers, but Hugh Bonneville’s Mr Brown is much the same. Bonneville’s specialty is the beleaguered patriarch – rational, kind and responsible, but so set in his ways he has difficulty coping with the unexpected. Yet, he has adapted brilliantly to having a bear as part of his household, perhaps because Paddington, still voiced by Ben Whishaw, is his kind of person – a self-effacing innocent who wants only to do the right thing.
This could make the films seem very twee and maybe extreme cynics think they are, but this one is already a hit internationally and the franchise is still attracting big names. Olivia Colman turns up, channelling Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, as the Home for Retired Bears’ Reverend Mother, and Antonio Banderas swaggers on to the scene as Hunter Cabot, a rakish riverboat captain with a shady history.
Olivia Colman channels Julie Andrews in Paddington in Peru.Credit: Studiocanal
Making his debut as a feature director, Dougal Wilson employs the usual mixture of live action and CGI. The film was shot partly in Colombia and Peru, and the Andes peaks and Amazonian rainforests add plenty of drama to a scenario that really takes off when the Browns arrive at the Home for Retired Bears to find Aunt Lucy is missing. She has embarked alone on some mysterious journey. Nor can the Reverend Mother offer much help. She can’t mount a search party, she says with a blithe insincerity that immediately sets alarm bells ringing. She must stay behind and tend her flock.
So the Browns set off down river, unwisely trusting the swashbuckling Captain Cabot to see them through. It’s a long way from Windsor Gardens.
As the plot thickens in tandem with the rainforest, you do feel a certain nostalgia for Paddington’s London life and his role as the lovably hapless comic earnestly trying to get to grips with the strangeness of it all. He’s still lovably hapless, leading the others on to who knows where with his eternal optimism. The slapstick, however, tends to be upstaged by the twists in the plot. But the climax is spectacular – if a little too elaborately conceived – and Paddington’s charms remain as potent as ever. There’s also an epilogue suggesting there could be more good times to come.
Paddington in Peru is released in cinemas on January 1.
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