Paddington in Peru (2024)

Paddington in Peru arrives as the third installment in a franchise that has made a career of being unfailingly polite, and it does not deviate. The bear receives a passport, learns that Aunt Lucy has vanished from the Home for Retired Bears, and decamps to South America with the Brown family in tow. The plot involves a river journey, a shipwreck, a hunt for a mythical city of gold, and a great deal of marmalade. The screenplay, adapted from Michael Bond's stories, keeps its ambitions modest and its manners impeccable.

For those of us who arrive at each new family release with a clipboard, this one offers remarkably little to mark down. The Amazon sits on screen as scenery, not as a climate parable. Antonio Banderas plays a riverboat captain tormented by ancestral ghosts and a hunger for gold, which is the oldest adventure trope in the drawer, not an indictment of late capitalism. Olivia Colman's Reverend Mother turns out to be a Cabot with her own designs on El Dorado. Nobody pauses to explain what the audience ought to think. The Peruvian setting and the Peruvian cast members exist because the story requires them, and the film lets them be.

There is a warmth here that resists categorization, and that is the point. The film wants only to entertain children and mildly exhaust their parents, and it succeeds at both. Hugh Grant reappears in a post-credits scene, still imprisoned, still plotting, and the film extends him the forgiveness it extends everyone. Two hundred million dollars and a ninety-three percent approval rating suggest the audience agrees. The ledger stays clean. Paddington remains a bear, the Browns remain a family, and the marmalade remains on the sandwich. Some films aspire to lecture. This one aspires to a nap in a comfortable chair, and achieves it.