Paddington travels to Peru to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy, who now resides at the Home for Retired Bears. With the Brown Family in tow, a thrilling adventure ensues when a mystery plunges them into...
While the idea of doing a third Paddington film without Paul King felt rather cynical, “Paddington In Peru”, even with the marmalade high obviously wearing off, proved to be a cynical idea done right.
When it comes to the Paddington movies, Paul King had mastered turning tricky concepts that seem all too general and easy to mock into a satisfying family slam dunk. Director Dougal Wilson seems intent on mimicking and mirroring King’s natural aesthetic and does harbors a clear labour of love that gels perfectly with more old-school film-making and the direction packs an expected whimsical with a nice level of energy.
Between the waterfalls, Inca riddles and the deluge of Indiana Jones nods, leaving behind the pastel-colored familiar grounds of Windsor for the even more familiar and overused jungle setting we see in most media nowadays, can’t NOT feel like an interchangeable setting change for the hell of it. But for what it’s worth, the production design thankfully steers clear of relocating itself just to lush window dressing. It doesn’t take away from how jarring it was seeing the jungle being pristine and clearly studio-shot again, since the immaculate nature of its construction felt studio-shot at times but it works within the context of the story.
While somewhat lacking in the comedic department, the number of Steve McQueen/Buster Keaton-centric tribute gags kept enough laughs flowing down a steady enough stream and on par with it’s predecessors, the film is both well-lit and composed, bustling with many simple but effective shots and angles from cinematography and is niftily edited in equal measure. Pacing is fluid and mitigates well with the tone, said tone keeps the just-hanging-out-with-friends vibe light and bouncy, special effects continue to be consistently impressive even without the subtle grain and edge blurring, I do like the simplicity of the costume design and Dario Marianelli’s score remains quite the whimsical atmospheric live-wire as it was in the previous two films.
Not surprising anyone, great job from the cast all around; they bounce off each other wonderfully (with one noticeable exception) and the dynamics between them somehow strengthens the oodles of wordplay in the dialogue…..even if the absurdist wit to the slapstick comedy is missing, because the laughs, despite still being plentiful, aren’t as airtight as they were previously around here.
Still, this is the one movie out of the three that felt most like an ensemble with the humans taking a more central role.
Universally speaking, this more or less follows the formula of the first two movies, only more obvious and trying much harder to be extravagant in its delivery. However, the template this film was given was pitched by Paul King specifically for Dougal to use and the few idiosyncratic tweaks he screws in gives the film a pleasantly odd personality, reminiscent of the other two enjoyable entries. Yes, the more standard adventure narrative is less idiosyncratic than the vignette approach from before but it never moves without purpose and to give the narrative credit, it’s still very much in tune with the series’s themes and admirable opposition to parochialism and xenophobia while highlighting the important ties that bind between families and of tribes. It still stays true to what is so important about the Paddington character and how the films are structured around him falling into Rube Goldberg-ian type mistakes that only escalate in nature.
The heart of Paddington is still intact despite the recycling.
I do have…..issues though. On one hand, the story never, NOT ONCE, convinced me that Paddington going back to Peru was a story that needed to be told and most of that boils down to the reality that Paddington is mostly in his element when he’s OUT of it. Yes, it does make thematic, dramatic and narrative sense for him to be drawn back to the place of his birth and even more sense for the family to come along since having THEM be out of their element will help work through their own issues but not much effort is actually implemented into the family having issues that need working out. That is, unless you count the dad taking more risks and the mom going through the painful process of learning to let go but even those emotional beats are treated pretty sporadically despite their well-intentions and coincidentally, it gives the Browns a lot less to do.
Also, as much as I respect the decision to not keep the antagonists intentions a secret for too long, their motivations are about as simple as they come. Nothing wrong with boiling the motivation down to just a thirst for riches but when your previous villains are taxidermist Nicole Kidman and loony-bin thespian Hugh Grant, that’s a pretty rote switch-up of faces even if Coleman and Banderas give it their all.
So yeah, it’s not a perfect movie (then again, no films are, even if the first two films scratch that itch pretty close) but when this is the worst your series can get, you got a pretty damn good trilogy on your hands.
