“Paddington tries to make toffee”, “Paddington makes a mess cleaning the chimney”, “Paddington investigates the disappearance of Mr Brown’s prize marrow”. Such are the types of adventure that Paddington creator Michael Bond wrote for his fuzzy creation. The Bond books are filled with stories of the bear as an unwitting agent of chaos in small, domestic English settings.
In practically every instance of Bond’s stories, Paddington would enter an ordinary and often genteel situation – meeting a vacuum cleaner salesman, for instance, or attending a ballet – and despite his unfailing politeness, he’d get into a royal mess about which everyone would have a good-natured laugh. The visual comedy of a bear testing a neighbour’s garden hammock or riding a horse at a local gymkhana – a whimsically unlikely element placed into familiar, everyday surroundings – was the gag.
The first two of StudioCanal’s Paddington movies, directed by Paul King, understood that. Many of the first two films’ funniest and most memorable sequences, from the barber shop disaster to the Browns’ bathroom flood, were skits straight out of Bond’s books. In each, Paddington himself was the disrupting factor. Alongside star villainous turns by Hollywood’s Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, with ramped-up action sequences on runaway trains or the rooftops of London landmarks, the films kept that essential ‘foreign element in everyday setting’ format.
Then came Paddington in Peru, the third film in the series, based on an idea by original director and writer Paul King and Simon Farnaby, that the Ben Whishaw-voiced bear should visit his homeland. “They like the idea of a circular feeling to the story, with Paddington returning to the origins established in the first film,” the latest film’s director Dougal Wilson told Den of Geek in November 2024.
“We are continuing the themes of home and being an immigrant and coming back to where you are officially from and how you feel when you get there.”
Lovely stuff. Paddington’s immigrant story (entirely fitting with Bond’s original character, which was inspired by the journeys of refugees and WWII evacuees) and the films’ messages about tolerance and belonging are part of their magic.
What the premise of Paddington in Peru ignores though, is that this character and these jokes work precisely because Paddington isn’t in Peru. There’s no gag intrinsic to a bear being in a wild; that’s where they live.
Out now in the US and Canada after a staggered international release, Paddington in Peru tells the story of the Brown family travelling to South America to visit Paddington’s Aunt Lucy. There, they uncover a mystery that involves a perilous river journey, an ancient tribe, and centuries-old hidden treasure. It’s a larger-than-life romp built around fairground-style thrills, and a very nice family film – quite possibly the kind of movie people anticipated when StudioCanal’s CGI Paddington project was first announced. Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas are good value in in it, as Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas tend to be.
Paddington in Peru, however, isn’t as funny as the first two films. It’s sweet and silly, but few could argue that any of its sequences are comedic standouts. It’s missing the precision-engineered Buster Keaton-style comic timing of say, Paddington 2’s window cleaning sequence. What it’s really missing though, is that vital clash of bear-meets-non-bear-world.
The third movie was a box office hit, and, perhaps thanks to the work of the first two films, opened bigger in the UK than either of them. That makes a fourth film inevitable, and indeed, StudioCanal’s deputy CEO Anna Marsh announced one last week: “There will be a fourth film,” says Marsh. “We’re thinking about the next movies and we’re working on a new TV series as well as the stage show musical with Sonia Friedman and Eliza Lumley.”
Note the plural “movies”. While they’re making money like this, Paddington pictures are clearly going nowhere. A plea then, if it’s not already too late to make it: next time, leave the bear in London. Make Paddington Bond’s unwitting agent of chaos and hapless messer-up of everyday situations. Make his golden heart in the body of a wild beast once again shine a light on humanity’s bigotry and its brilliance. For Paddington 4, please keep his paws on the ground.
Paddington in Peru: Lost in the Jungle is out now in the US and Canada, and on home release in the UK.
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From https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/paddington-4-needs-to-keep-the-bear-in-london/
