Paddington in Peru review: 'Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas are clearly having a blast'

Paddington in Peru director Dougal Wilson does a slick job approximating the hand-crafted style of the first two Paddington films, but in trying so hard to recapture what worked, his attempt lacks some of their mischievous charm, writes Alistair Harkness

Paddington in Peru | Contributed

Paddington in Peru (PG) ★★★☆☆

Bird (15) ★★★☆☆

Piece by Piece (PG) ★★☆☆☆

As The Godfather Part II of family films, the universally adored Paddington 2 was always going be a tough act to top, so it’s not really surprising that Paddington in Peru doesn’t come close. Made in the same ebullient style, this one feels more formulaic and, despite boasting Olivia Colman as a guitar-playing nun and Antonio Banderas as a would-be-adventurer trying to overcome a family curse, it lacks a villain as entertainingly outrageous as Hugh Grant’s hammy thespian Phoenix Buchanan. 

That said, it’s still an entertaining, family-friendly adventure, one that begins with a slightly elongated replay of Paddington 2’s opening flashback scene and proceeds to fill out the origins story for the bear with the hard stare and the hardcore marmalade addiction.

As the title indicates, the plot finds Paddington (once again voiced by Ben Wishaw) returning to deepest, darkest Peru. The reason is his beloved Aunt Lucy, who’s been acting strangely and requires his presence. Accompanying him are the Brown family, who seize the opportunity to embark on an impromptu adventure as a way of bringing them closer together. 

Headed by Hugh Bonneville and Emily Mortimer (replacing Sally Hawkins), the Browns soon find themselves on a trek into the Amazon after arriving at the Home for Retired Bears and being informed that Aunt Lucy has disappeared, possibly on a quixotic quest to find the gateway to the lost city of Eldorado. 

The whimsical plot brings them into contact with Colman’s shifty nun and Banderas’ riverboat captain. Both actors are clearly having a blast, the former bringing an entertainingly unhinged quality to her mother superior and the latter subverting his own swashbuckler image to fun effect. Taking over from Paul King, director Dougal Wilson does a slick job approximating the hand-crafted style of the first two films, but in trying so hard to recapture what worked, this one lacks some of their mischievous charm.

Bird | Atsushi Nishijima

After her social realist-tinged bovine documentary Cow, Andrea Arnold continues the animal theme with Bird, a vibrant, messy, magical realism-tinged drama about an avian-obsessed 12-year-old girl called Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams) who befriends a mysterious stranger searching for his parents on the council estate where he grew up.

This is the eponymous Bird, an odd duck, made odder by the fact he’s played by Franz Rogowski. Perching himself on the roof of the block of flats Bird only vaguely remembers inhabiting, he can’t help but intrigue the mixed-race Bailey, who’s on the cusp of adolescence and navigating her own stressful rites of passage courtesy of her erratic dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), whom she’s just found out is getting married to his new live-in girlfriend. 

Adding to this chaos is her 14-year-old step-brother, who’s also just knocked up his own similarly underage girlfriend and is part of knife gang dispensing vigilante justice to anyone with a dodgy reputation. Then there’s her estranged mother, whose violently abusive boyfriend poses a risk to Bailey and her other, much younger siblings.

It’s a lot for Bailey — and us — to process and, at times, the plot can seem a little melodramatic and random, especially with the heightened bam-pottery of Keoghan’s character (who has a subplot involving a toad that emits hallucinogenic slime). But the chaos also makes the more audacious flights of fancy involving Rogowski’s Bird seem less out of whack, with Arnold tying them to Bailey’s own coming of age and her fascination with filming birds on her phone. 

Those mobile phone videos are also part of the film’s visual language, and though at this point they play like eye-rolling arthouse clichés — bluntly symbolising Bailey’s own subconscious desire to escape the strictures of her world — Arnold still presents them sincerely as profound moments of transcendence because, for Bailey, that’s exactly what they are. 

It’s not quite clear why Piece by Piece director Morgan Neville opted to render this documentary profile of musician, producer and hitmaker extraordinaire Pharrell Williams with animated Lego bricks. The reason Pharrell offers in the film is a bit of a garbled attempt to get at the nature of creativity, telling Neville that he thinks the universe is like a Lego set, full of limitless potential to build new things from stuff that already exists. That’s an unintentionally revealing metaphor coming from someone who was once sued by Marvin Gaye’s estate for copyright infringement, but frustratingly the film doesn’t go there, focusing instead on Pharrell’s undeniable talent for crafting beats and hooks, and building, inevitably, towards the creation of his own ear-wormy mega-hit Happy. 

So the suspicion remains that the novelty of the approach is its own justification, used to distinguish what is otherwise a fairly rote exploration of Pharrell’s career. Indeed, if the Lego signifies anything it’s the ongoing desecration of the music documentary as a synthetic marketing tool that brand-conscious artists can use to construct whatever narrative will benefit them most.

All films in cinemas from 8 November