Paddington, the duffel-coated bear with a penchant for marmalade and mishaps, was already a cultural institution of nearly 60 years’ standing by the time he headlined his first feature film a decade ago. The success of Paul King’s “Paddington” and “Paddington 2,” however, promoted the diminutive children’s-book hero to the status of national treasure: a warm and fuzzy global mascot for British pluck and politeness, to the point that he was drafted in for a sketch with the late Queen Elizabeth II to celebrate her platinum jubilee in 2022. The films are lovely, funny and just a little odd; the associated branding has since edged into a patriotic tweeness that’s less endearing. So on the face of it, it’s a good idea for Paddington’s third screen outing, “Paddington in Peru,” to get him out of Blighty for a while, and back to his Latin roots.
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The scenery isn’t the only thing that has changed in this third go-round. King has handed over directorial duties to first-time feature helmer Dougal Wilson, and writing ones to a fresh set of scribes — two of whom, Jon Foster and James Lamont, conceived the aforementioned royalty sketch. (King and collaborator Simon Farnaby retain a story credit.) The difference is felt. King’s gonzo visual imagination and antic humor lent the first two an offbeat, slightly chaotic charm that won over as many adults as it did children. Wilson’s film, while suitably bright and busy, is a more conventional kids’ entertainment, with a contrived quest narrative that lands the franchise further than ever from the modest, homey spirit of Michael Bond’s original books.
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Which isn’t to say it doesn’t work: “Paddington in Peru” is, as any Paddington adventure should be, fast and buoyant and disarmingly sunny in a way that viewers who weren’t alive — or at least of cinemagoing age — for the 2017 release of “Paddington 2” will lap up. They’re certainly unlikely to remember or care that the new film’s benevolent messages regarding immigrant identity and inclusive family values are wholly recycled from the previous films. They bear repeating anyway. And if the jokes aren’t as ornately, absurdly and hilariously involved as King and Farnaby’s best, the beaming, passive-aggressive villainy of Olivia Colman in a nun’s habit provides some compensation.
The setup is swift, with a prologue detailing how the young, unclothed Paddington (voiced, once again, with winningly nervous cheeriness by Ben Whishaw), in clumsy pursuit of a perfectly ripe orange, got separated from his Peruvian rainforest tribe, and swept via fast currents and waterfalls into the rescuing arms of his adoptive Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton). Fast-forward however many bear years to contemporary London, and Paddington is now a fully-fledged British citizen, following an inept run-in with a passport photo booth that remains the film’s wittiest physical gag. His travel documents conveniently arrive ahead of a letter from the Mother Superior (Colman) presiding over the Peruvian bear retirement home where Aunt Lucy is a resident, encouraging him to visit before her health deteriorates.
His well-off human guardians, the Brown family, need scant persuading to drop everything and head to Peru with him: Stuffy patriarch Henry (Hugh Bonneville) is encouraged by his employers to show a less risk-averse side, while his wife Mary (Emily Mortimer, seamlessly taking over from Sally Hawkins) wants one big family adventure together before empty-nest syndrome hits. She gets rather more than she bargained for when, on their arrival, they’re informed that Aunt Lucy has disappeared into the wilderness, cuing a jungle-wide search mission that, by various leaps of narrative logic, doubles as a treasure quest for a certain mythical city of gold. “Aren’t we all, in our own way, searching for El Dorado?” muses Hunter (a ripe Antonio Banderas), the riverboat captain hired to steer them into the heart of not-very-darkness. The Browns politely disagree, but go with it anyway.
It’s a plot that allows for considerable amounts of derring-do and mild exotic peril — tarantulas and anteaters and river rapids, oh my — and gives the franchise’s visual effects team more to work on besides their immaculate photoreal rendering of Paddington himself, once more fluffily tangible down to his last digital whisker. The comedy, however, stays mostly back at base camp with Colman, a hoot whether twirling, Von Trapp-style, with a guitar in hand during the film’s single musical number, or deflecting the queries of the Browns’ housekeeper (Julie Walters) with a blithe, unprompted insistence that her operation is “not at all suspicious.”
She’s never quite permitted to go full-tilt, however, just as the storytelling in “Paddington in Peru” never quite reaches the anarchic crescendo of the previous films. A protracted hilltop climax juggles familiar slapstick tropes — the failsafe juvenile laugh-getter of a man getting whacked in the groin — and obstacles from a vintage era of adventure matinees, ahead of a marmalade-sticky emotional resolution that reminds us (of course) that home is both movable and where the heart is.
Wilson, celebrated in the U.K. for a number of elaborate, event-status Christmas ads for the department store John Lewis, directs it all with smooth, pacy aplomb and precise tear-milking instincts. But the result isn’t as formally or tonally characterful as the previous films, just as the script, more than before, feels bound to a well-worn template. Paddington belongs to everyone these days, as well he should. But he’s become a little less peculiar in the process.
