Paddington returns to Peru to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy, who now resides at the Home for Retired Bears. With the Brown family in tow, a thrilling adventure ensues when a mystery plunges them into an unexpected journey.
After two excellent and charming movies, the third ‘Paddington’ movie has done what many sequels do and gone bigger and bolder, but unfortunately not better, as it takes the action from London to Peru where of course Paddington is originally from. Everyone is back for the third movie in the series, with the exception of Sally Hawkins, who is replaced by Emily Mortimer as Mrs. Brown, with new cast additions led by Olivia Colman as a nun at a bear retirement home in Peru, and Antonio Banderas as the charismatic captain of a small boat the Brown’s hire to sail up the Amazon, but much of the magic of the first two movies has sadly not returned.
The plot of ‘Paddington in Peru’ as the title suggests, centres on Paddington returning to his native country after receiving a letter suggesting his Aunt Lucy was in need of his help. This ends up with the entire Brown family setting off on an adventure across the Atlantic, where encounters with a couple of shady characters lead to the gang getting lost in the Amazonian jungle. Tied up in this is the legend of El Dorado and a heap of cursed treasure supposedly buried deep in the Amazon, and to be honest, there is a bit too much plot here and it feels a little overengineered.
As I mentioned at the outset, it is common for sequels to mistake higher stakes for higher quality, and after an excellent second movie in ‘Paddington 2’, this series too has fallen to that temptation. There are definitely things to like here, from the very British charm of the characters to the fish out of water laughs from Paddington himself, but they are lesser than in the previous movies and the story nor the new characters really spark to life in the way that Hugh Grant’s Phoenix Buchanan did in the prior movie for example.
‘Paddington in Peru’ is a pleasant enough viewing experience but ranked against the high standards set by the previous Paddington movies it has to go down as a disappointment and perhaps indicates the filmmakers have taken this little bear as far as they can.
Rating: 3/5
Directed By: Dougal Wilson
Starring: Ben Whishaw, Hugh Bonneville, Emily Mortimer, Madeleine Harris, Samuel Joslin, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Olivia Colman, Antonio Banderas, Carla Tous, Imelda Staunton, Hayley Atwell, Joel Fry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Robbie Gee, Jessica Hynes and Simon Farnaby
'I have a purpose. If you think that it's some kind of blessing it's not. It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through.' Marty Supreme (2025) 