The sweet, furry hero of “Paddington in Peru” loves marmalade sandwiches so much that he carries one under his hat. Carrying a marmalade sandwich under his hat is so second-nature to Paddington that he completely forgets he has one under there in this movie until he needs a marmalade sandwich to get out of a—oh, my dear reader, I have to say “jam,” I have no other choice. It’s what a Paddington story would do. And besides, “Paddington in Peru” is a marmalade sandwich of a movie.
The first two films in this series, “Paddington” and “Paddington 2,” were directed by Paul King, who established the template that his replacement—music video director Dougal Wilson, in his feature debut—uses here, with idiosyncratic tweaks that give the movie its own pleasingly odd personality. As in the other two entries, the animators’ performance of Paddington and returning cast member Ben Whishaw’s vocal work set the tone and pace. The soft-spoken bear in the red-stained bucket hat is polite, easygoing, a bit literal-minded, but capable of sudden and surprising bursts of kookiness, a great friend, and incredibly committed once he’s made up his mind to do something.
The quest here takes Paddington to Peru, where he hopes to find his beloved Aunt Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton). Lucy was living at a Home for Retired Bears when she began behaving oddly. A letter from the establishment alarms Paddington into deciding to visit her. Paddington’a adoptive family The Browns (Hugh Bonneville’s Henry; Emily Mortimer’s Mary, replacing Sally Hawkins in the role; Madeleine Harris’ Judy, and Samuel Joslin’s Jonathan) accompany him in solidarity.
When they arrive at the Home for Retired Bears—built in what was once a mission, and headed up by The Reverend Mother (Olivia Colman)—who composes and performs a song heralding the Browns’ arrival, capped with a little tribute to “The Sound of Music”—they discover that Aunt Lucy has disappeared, leaving only her glasses and bracelet. A chance discovery of a map in Lucy’s room points the group toward a landmark called Rumi Rock, and onward—or so they hope—to El Dorado, the fabled, possibly nonexistent lost city of gold that consumed the lives of many explorers.
This setup is, of course, a motherlode for homages to classic jungle movies, and “Paddington in Peru” manages many (mostly subtle) ones, including “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “The Lost City of Z.” The most dominant is John Huston’s “The African Queen,” wherein Katharine Hepburn’s Methodist Missionary Rose Sayer hires Humphrey Bogart’s steamboat captain Charlie Allnut to help her blow up a German U-boat. The centerpiece of Huston’s movie is a series of rides down perilous rapids, and “Paddington in Peru” has its own version of that. It also has its own answer to Allnut, a sweaty, exuberantly goofy boat captain named Hunter Cabot (Antonio Banderas, exactly the guy you want in a role like this) who travels the Amazon with his plucky teenage daughter Gina (Carla Tous) and can trace his lineage back through multiple generations of treasure hunters, male and female (and all played by Banderas!) including a conquistador who materializes behind Cabot to offer him advice whether he wants any or not.
But “Paddington in Peru” is pleasurable mainly for its just-hanging-out-with-friends vibe, which it wears with quiet grace (even though, if the end credits are any indication, it required years’ worth of labor by hundreds of visual effects artists and animators, as well as live-action crews shooting “background plates” for their artistry in Peru and Columbia). It takes a special kind of all-on-the-same-page commitment to make a huge production present as an adorable little honey-drizzled dessert. This movie’s got it. It’s not trying to be anything but a slapstick comedy with a sentimental heart, and it gets into that zone immediately and stays there.
The performers are all in the zone, though one might wish that Judy, Jonathan, and Gina were given more to do while in it. (A budding young love story between Jonathan and Gina would seem an obvious way to tie some of the plot machinations together, but the movie doesn’t try that.) Bonneville and Mortimer have the “square, stiff-upper-lipped but essentially good-natured Brit” demeanor down to a science. Mortimer’s storybook-narrator voice smooths some rough expository edges, and Bonneville gets a delightful running gag involving Henry’s fear of a specific breed of giant tropical spider that is, of course, fated to appear at the least opportune time.
Freed from the necessity to give audiences more of what they already know they want, Colman and Banderas give capital-B Big performances—dazzling grins, unnerving laughs, boisterous energy—that paradoxically manage to seem contained and exact. Each pratfall and double-take is precisely measured. A scene where the conquistador ancestor emerges from an oil painting and starts up an insinuating but amusingly casual conversation with Cabot should receive some kind of special Oscar; if Jim Carrey’s performance opposite himself in the latest “Sonic the Hedgehog” is a 40-meter wide splatter-painted mural of one man/multi-character acting, Banderas’s performances as multiple generations of gold-hunters is an art gallery full of small but exquisitely detailed sketches. Colman’s work is its own peculiar little miracle. Her flashing eyes and pearly grin are perched on the edge of manic from the first moment she appears onscreen. She’s such a steamroller of cheerful enthusiasm that she becomes a symbol of her character, an avatar representing the idea of joy. When she dances, she seems to have been possessed by the smiley-face emoji.
This is a fun movie that furthers the series’ mandate to provide one kind of entertainment for kids and another for adults. Like its esteemed predecessors in this vein, including Looney Tunes and earlier seasons of “The Simpsons,” it believes in its pro-social messages—the family you seek out is as valid as the family you were born into; being decent is its own reward; heed the little voice inside you that says not to trust certain people; etc.—even as it pokes fun at the straightforward way it delivers them. Paddington is the perfect hero for this kind of entertainment. He’s a bear and a person, childlike but not childish, and wise in his way.
In theaters now.
