‘Paddington in Peru’ is pleasant, underachieving nonsense

[my belated review to the beloved series’ threequel]

“A nun went berserk. It happens.” So said a jaded security guard at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in the family-film masterpiece Paddington 2. That guard may never have known that the miscreant “nun” was actually Hugh Grant’s hilariously vain, sinister master of disguise — or that shortly thereafter Grant’s character slipped right past him disguised as an archbishop.

In the threequel Paddington in Peru, Olivia Colman (The Crown) commits far more absolutely to the role of the Reverend Mother, head of a community of blue-habited sisters in Peru devoted to the improbable mission of the Home for Retired Bears. Colman is almost as hilariously cheerful as Grant was hilariously vain; with her precise enunciation and ingenuously wide-eyed gaze, she may strike you as a demented parody of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music even before she breaks out a guitar and begins twirling on a mountain meadow. Will she also go berserk and reveal herself as another scheming imposter? Or is the villain the flamboyant riverboat captain, Hunter Cabot, played by a game Antonio Banderas?

If you’re as much a fan of writer-director Paul King’s two Paddington movies as I am, you may think of them often while watching this threequel, from first-time feature director Dougal Wilson. Partly, perhaps, because you might just think of them often in general—but also because this film, while charting its own path in obvious respects, clearly wants to remind you of its brilliant predecessors (among many other films, from The African Queen to Raiders of the Lost Ark). In fact, among the threequel’s best moments is a must-see mid-credits sequence returning us directly to the inspired lunacy of Paddington 2.

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