Paddington Bear? Paddington Bore, more like. The third big-screen outing for Michael Bond’s loveable ursine, which sees him return to his native Peru to find his errant aunt Lucy, shows distinct signs of franchise fatigue.
Ben Whishaw is back as the warm voice of the CGI’d, marmalade-sandwich-chomping beast, as are most of the main human cast playing his adoptive family the Browns. Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas are the new star signings, as a jolly nun with a secret and a roguish riverboat captain.
The colours are as rich and the production design as lovely as ever, adorned with retro seaplanes and antique blunderbusses. But one misses the easy charm, the fluency and the icy sliver of jeopardy that Paul King brought to the first two movies, which had genuine cross-generational appeal. This one, directed by Dougal Wilson, feels ponderous and slow.
The slapstick scrapes Paddington gets into are effortful and all the scripted jokes are painstakingly explained, as if younger audience members are dim. Although the story sees him shipwrecked on rocks, chased by Indiana-Jones style boulders and potentially turned into a stew, there’s no sense that he is ever under any real threat.
The emotions attending his repatriation (he has a British passport now) go largely unexplored till the end, while the displacement of the urban Browns to the torrid jungle is played for meagre and predictable laughs.
What happens to Paddington when everyone around him grows up or grows old? In the first film he was an orphan refugee (Bond’s original inspiration for the character), in the second a settled, juvenile part of the family.
But now the Browns’ daughter Judy is off to university and their inventor son Sam has become a hormonal slob, holed up in his bedroom and endlessly spraying deodorant on his pits and pants. Hugh Bonneville’s fuddy-duddy act as Mr Brown looks tired, and Emily Mortimer lacks the spark that Sally Hawkins brought to Mrs Brown.
Mostly, Paddington is chased around the Amazon rainforest, without much conviction or effort, by Banderas. His character, Hunter Cabot, is madly searching for the gold of El Dorado, while the bear is looking for family: yes, kids, there’s a learning moment coming. Colman also acts on autopilot, amping up her eyes and teeth for one beatifically demented, wimple-framed grin after another.
Between them, Whishaw and the animators still bring remarkable life to the CGI bear but he’s carrying too much on his small shoulders these days. Bond’s books, and the treasured 1976 TV series, showed us snapshots of everyday life from the viewpoint of a quizzical outsider.
Now Paddington has become an icon of British tolerance and a much-memed combination of Charon and the angel of death, conveying public figures including the late Queen to the afterlife. Maybe a third, feature-length story about family and morality is too much on top of all that. Time to bear him off the screen, perhaps.
In cinemas on Friday
Cert PG, 106mins
