Just as jolly as the previous two films, but not really as funny, Paddington in Peru is a sweet-natured and primary-colour family adventure which takes Paddington Bear back to his South American homeland: the vast Amazonian wilderness (created with visual effects) where he grew to innocent bearhood in the care of his Aunt Lucy, before being dispatched to England.
It’s another bit of cheeky entertainment, with nods to Indiana Jones and no fewer than two films by Werner Herzog. The prologue tells you a bit more about Paddington’s relationship to Aunt Lucy, of whom the Brown family in the present day receives alarming news; she is melancholy and troubled, unwilling to leave her room in the Peruvian home for retired bears. Isn’t it time for Paddington to pay her a visit?
Ben Whishaw supplies Paddington’s gentle, guileless voice and the Browns themselves are as bright as ever. Hugh Bonneville is lovably goofy as Mr Brown, who is doing a little better in the office these days; Emily Mortimer takes over from Sally Hawkins as Mrs Brown, suffering from empty-nester angst at the imminent departure of her two children, Judy (Madeleine Harris) and Jonathan (Samuel Joslin). Julie Walters is Mrs Bird, who is their housekeeper and perhaps also a distant relative.
The whole gang irrepressibly show up in Peru, greeted by a strange guitar-playing nun in charge of the bear care home – a funny performance from Olivia Colman. But Paddington and the Browns realise that they must go on an adventure into the jungle, the heart of darkness, helped by a roguish, rumpled riverboat captain, played by Antonio Banderas.
Colman and Banderas are formidable character turns and offer sterling support – but even combined, they don’t match the comedy payload delivered by Hugh Grant’s conceited thesp Phoenix Buchanan in the now legendary Paddington 2. This Paddington threequel is a perfectly decent bet for the holidays, and never anything other than entertaining, but the gag density has thinned out and removing Paddington from Blighty, though making perfect narrative and dramatic sense, and in tune with the franchise’s admirable opposition to parochialism and xenophobia, is a slightly shark-jumping move, like a special episode of a TV sitcom that takes the cast to the Costa del Sol. Some of the laugh-context and humour-ecosystem has been removed. There are fewer jokes, moment by moment, but just as much sprightliness, spectacle and fun.