Paddington 2 (2017)

Paddington 2 arrives with a reputation that has swollen to unreasonable proportions, and the sommelier's task is to taste it without being swayed by the crowd. It is, undeniably, a lovely thing: a bear in a blue coat, a prison converted to pastel gentility, a villain with a wardrobe of disguises. The craft is impeccable and the sentiment is earned. Our concern, however, is not quality. Our concern is the precise temperature of its social consciousness, and on that front the film is temperate to the point of tepid.

The casting is overwhelmingly white and British, with diversity confined to the incidental texture of London's streets. Paddington himself functions as an immigrant figure, and the film carries a soft multicultural warmth, a gentle rejoinder to a certain insular politics, though race as a subject is never examined. Mary Brown participates ably in the rescue plot, yet the film advances no argument about women's place in the world. The villain is a vain actor, not a financier, so the film's critique of greed amounts to very little.

What is absent proves more instructive than what is present. No climate anxieties trouble the riverbank. No bodies are celebrated. No neurodivergent characters anchor the emotional arc. History is left unrevised, and the past is permitted to remain the past. The moral, that kindness is a discipline worth practicing, is delivered with such lightness that it never becomes a sermon. This is a film that wants to be liked, and it is. It simply does not wish to instruct us. For that restraint, the sommelier offers a grudging nod.