“The bar for the bear has been raised awfully high,” said Nick De Semlyen in Empire.
It’s been a decade since the “polite, Peruvian furball with a hankering for fruit preserves” first graced our screens, and seven years since “Paddington 2” turned out to be “‘The Godfather Part II’ of adorable comedies”. Living up to these wildly successful box-office hits was always going to be difficult. Now, the hotly anticipated threequel has arrived, and while the new film is “perfectly fine”, something “intangible” is absent. “The marmalade has lost a bit of its zest.”
The ‘feel of a substitute’
“Just as jolly” as the first films but “not really as funny”, “Paddington in Peru” sees the beloved bear returning to his South American homeland, with the Brown family in tow, to visit his Aunt Lucy, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.
But when they arrive at the home for retired bears, a “strange, guitar-playing nun” in charge of the care home (Olivia Colman) informs Paddington his aunt has gone missing. And so the family embark on an adventure into the Amazonian jungle to track her down, with the assistance of a “roguish, rumpled riverboat captain” played by Antonio Banderas.
The Browns are “as bright as ever”, but while Colman and Banderas are a welcome addition to the cast, they “don’t match the comedy payload delivered by Hugh Grant’s conceited thesp Phoenix Buchanan in the now legendary ‘Paddington 2′”.
A new director was brought in for the latest instalment, and Emily Mortimer has replaced Sally Hawkins as Mrs Brown. This gives the film the feel “of a substitute”, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture, like it is “trying its hardest to replicate the blissful magic” that the second film was able to “conjure so effortlessly”.
‘Impeccably pleasant’
All of the expected elements are present, the film just isn’t “as good as it was in 2017”: the plot is “more contrived”, there are “too many convoluted backstories”, and while the jokes “keep you smiling”, they fail to spark “more than two or three actual laughs”.
The movie isn’t as “resonant”, either. Mr Gruber (Jim Broadbent) briefly talks about his “mixed feelings” about being an immigrant, but the theme isn’t treated with the same “heartfelt enthusiasm” as the bold brave celebration of inclusivity in “Paddington 2”.
“Paddington in Peru” fails to deliver the “emotional punch” that transformed the previous films into “powerhouses”, agreed Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. “Is there a flashback to a baby bear? Of course there is! Merchandise calls!”
But the “joy isn’t gone” from the latest film. Its pleasures are “rarer but still sweet”: Andy Kelly’s “fastidious” sets make “every interior look like an untouched escape room”, and “it’s impossible to resist Olivia Colman gallivanting around in a habit while doing her best impression of Maria in ‘The Sound of Music'”.
“Let’s be fair”, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph, “absolutely no one will have a bad time” watching this “bouncy, unobjectionable” film. “It’s all impeccably pleasant, just a tiny bit bland.”