In recent years Paddington Bear has made remarkable strides towards becoming a universally adored national icon, which is all the more impressive considering that business with him destroying the economy. . . hang on a minute, I'm getting him mixed up with Liz Truss again; this often happens with people I've seen next to the late queen on TV. The last Paddington movie was, for a while at least, officially the best movie ever made according to Rotten Tomatoes, and I believe a major London railway station has already been renamed in his honour.

So it is not really surprising that a third Paddington movie is this week's big film – the distributors in the UK have decided not to gamble on a Barbenheimer-style event and spaced Paddington in Peru, Gladiator II and Wicked out, thus depriving us of a potential Gladicked, Paddiator or Wickington fad. We shall see how this works out in due course, no doubt.

Significant for the new film is the fact that the key personnel from the previous ones have jumped ship, with director and co-writer Paul King and co-writer Simon Farnaby going off to do Wonka instead (well, King and Farnaby have made small contributions to the new film one way and another), and Sally Hawkins (who played a key role) opting to do. . . well, I would've guessed it was a Mike Leigh movie or something like that, but of course she's in Wonka too (and apparently she's doing a horror film with the guys who made Talk to Me).

So Paddington in Peru is directed by Dougal Wilson, who is an advert and music video guy making his feature debut. Some time has passed since the previous film (Samuel Joslin and Madeleine Harris, who play the Brown children, are 22 and 23 and look it) but Paddington (voiced as usual by Ben Whishaw) is still living with the Brown family in London (busloads of familiar faces queue up for one or two-line cameos). Mr Brown (Hugh Bonneville) is trying to become a bit more adventurous, while Mrs Brown (Emily Mortimer) is afflicted with pangs of regret as the prospect of her children leaving home comes closer to reality.

Before this can turn into an update of Tokyo Story with an animated bear, the plot is well and truly incited with the arrival of a letter from Peru informing Paddington that his Aunt Lucy misses him and is behaving rather oddly. So the bear decides to use his newly-acquired British passport to take the family on a trip to Peru to visit his aunt and hopefully cheer her up (I don't wish to bring the mood down here, but Paddington seems to have got his citizenship and passport rather more quickly and easily than my co-spousal unit received her visa, and he's a sodding bear).

However, when they arrive, the Mother Superior of the Home for Retired Bears (a glassy-eyed, semi-crazed performance from Olivia Colman, who is the best reason to see this movie) reveals that Aunt Lucy has completely disappeared, the only clue being that she has gone up the Amazon somewhere. Paddington promptly decides to hire a boat and go in search of her, settling for one owned by Hunter Cabot (Antonio Banderas). Yup, after several outings voicing a pantomime cat, one of the greatest Spanish actors of his generation is now doing comic support for a CGI bear. What was it that Pedro Almodovar said to Banderas when he decided to start making films in English. . . ?

'[It] will break you, you'll waste your talent. Don't say I didn't warn you.'

Oh yes, that was it. Well, Banderas is still probably the second-best reason to watch the movie. So everyone ends up doing various hi-jinks – not surprisingly, there's a sight gag based on Raiders of the Lost Ark, references to Kubrick and The Sound of Music, and (more surprisingly) what looks very much like a nod in the direction of Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

This is all fun and unexpectedly cine-literate stuff, and the film is not short of talent or polish. But what it is perhaps a little lacking in is, well, good jokes, or perhaps I should say sustained good jokes. There are quite long stretches where, while I was certainly engaged by the movie, I didn't actually find it particularly funny. Possibly this is just because the film is the equivalent of, for example, the Are You Being Served? movie or Holiday on the Buses   – no, I withdraw that, only the most heinous cinematic crimes warrant comparison with Holiday on the Buses. But it's still the case of a movie where everyone is sent off to foreign parts for a change of scene and atmosphere, which means a lot of the essential charm of the Paddington set-up – a bear in London – is dispelled.

You could also argue that the Paddington stories acquire much of their poignancy from Paddington's essential otherness, as a kind of refugee being taken in by an ordinary family, which is surely something of considerable symbolic value. (Whenever this point is raised in the legitimate media, Jeremy Clarkson – whose family made a pile producing unlicensed Paddington dolls back in the seventies – generally pops up to chunter on about how one shouldn't read too much of a message into children's stories, but what would you expect from someone like him.) And it may just be that the Amazon rainforest is just not as funny as London.

Still, this is amiable stuff, with obviously a very, very good cast, even if a lot of them aren't particularly well-served by the script – even Colman isn't quite as spectacular as Hugh Grant managed to be in the last film. There is an unexceptionable message about the joys of family and finding the place you belong, and generally not being acquisitive and awful, and the generally gentle and slightly cartoony Britishness of the film will ensure it finds an audience one way or another, but it is a step or two down from the first couple of Paddingtons. But the rights holders have been very vocal about their determination to 'turn a heritage brand into a global phenomenon' so I doubt this is the last we will see of dear old Paddington – even if there's something slightly heartbreaking about hearing such a well-loved and charming character described in those sorts of terms. That's the world today, though, I suppose.

Also Showing. . .

. . . you'll have to hang on for the column's thoughts on 'Brick Wall' Paul Mescal and a load of other sweaty blokes in Gladiator II, but in the meantime blood and thunder of a presumably slightly more thoughtful kind is available in Steve McQueen's Blitz (the other Steve McQueen, and nothing to do with the 2011 Jason Statham film of the same name). The movie kind of blots its copybook from the start by claiming to be set in 1940, when a significant plot event actually happened in March 1941, but what can you expect.

Anyway, this being a classy fairly big-budget British film, it is of course fixated on the Second World War (one day we will make fewer films like this one, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Imitation Game, Operation Mincemeat, etc, etc, but don't hold your breath). London is under aerial bombardment from the Luftwaffe and children are being evacuated to the countryside; one boy (Elliott Heffernan) refuses to go, jumps off the train, and heads back to find his mum (Saoirse Ronan). The rest of the film is his journey through a city in the process of being pulverised, while his mother searches for him.

Full of vivid detail and imagery, but the plot is rather slender. It works quite well as a sort of picaresque, slightly arty take on the home-front during the war, but McQueen clearly also has something to say about the experiences of people from other ethnic backgrounds during the war (the protagonist is mixed-race, his father having been deported on a racist pretext). Now, clearly this is a significant topic and worthy of exploration, but it doesn't sit entirely comfortably within this particular film. Without it, though, Blitz would probably feel somewhat lightweight. Not a bad movie by any means, though.

Awix

18.11.24 Front Page

Back Issue Page