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PADDINGTON IN PERU

Producer: Rosie Alison   Director: Dougal Wilson   Screenplay: Mark Burton, Jon Foster and James Lamont   Cast: Hugh Bonneville, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Madeleine Harris, Samuel Joslin, Carla Tous, Olivia Colman, Antonio Banderas, Ben Whishaw, Imelda Staunton, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Hayley Atwell, Aloreia Spencer, Joel Fry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Robbie Gee, Ben Miller, Jessica Hynes, Simon Farnaby and Ella Bruccoleri   Distributor: Sony Entertainment/Columbia Pictures

Grade: B

Paddington Bear had tea with Queen Elizabeth during her platinum jubilee in 2022, and the ever-polite, optimistic little fellow, who’s approaching diamond status (Michael Bond’s first book about him having come out in 1958), is riding higher than ever, the first two films starring him (2014 and 2017), co-written and directed by Paul King, having received virtually universal acclaim.  The third, “Paddington in Peru,” for which King only shares a story credit, the directing duties having been handed over to Dougal Wilson in his feature debut, isn’t the equal of its predecessors, but it’s amiable and amusing and should appeal across the age spectrum.

The action revolves around a trip to Paddington’s native country, “darkest Peru,” by him and his adoptive English family—father Henry Brown (Hugh Bonneville), mother Mary (Emily Mortimer, replacing Sally Hawkins), daughter Judy (Madeleine Harris), son Jonathan (Samuel Joslin) and housekeeper Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters).  But it’s not a vacation: Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) has received word from the nun (Olivia Colman) who oversees the home for retired bears where his beloved Aunt Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton) resides that she’s become moody and detached, and he’s determined to visit.

The Reverend Mother proves a weirdly upbeat sort—in a delightful opening musical number she strums her guitar like Maria in the Alps—but from the start her cheery smile is somehow suspicious, especially to Mrs. Bird.  She stays behind with the sister when the Browns go off to find Lucy, who’s suddenly disappeared into the forest.  Paddington’s found a clue in his aunt’s room, pointing to a rock where they can begin their search.

But to get there they have to hire a boat, and they convince Captain Hunter Cabot (Antonio Banderas) and his teen daughter Gina (Carla Tous) to take them.  Unfortunately, Cabot is literally haunted by his greedy ancestors, who urge him to give in to his inherited lust for gold when he deduces from Paddington’s bracelet that he’s the key to the location of the fabled city of El Dorado.  Dismissing his daughter’s pleas, he causes a shipwreck that leads to him and Paddington being together (though far apart in their intentions) on the one hand, and the Browns and Gina trying to catch up to them on the other.  Meanwhile Mrs. Bird discovers that the Reverend Mother placed a tracking device in a pendant she’d given Mrs. Brown, and the two jump into an antique plane to find them. 

Eventually, of course, everybody congregates at the site of El Dorado, where revelation after revelation occurs, life-changing choices are made, and the importance of family in all its forms is reemphasized.  After much hullabaloo Paddington finds his way into the city, which turns out to be a far cry from what legend had suggested.  But to him it means more than any cache of gold.

“Paddington in Peru” hasn’t the same degree of charm as the first two films, but it’s still miles ahead of most of today’s so-called family entertainment.  Youngsters are likely to be taken with Paddington’s slapstick adventures, and adults will enjoy its more knowing bits like allusions to other films, not just “The Sound of Music” but the Indiana Jones franchise.  The voice work of Whishaw and Staunton is once again exceptional, and though of the bear’s human family only Bonneville and Walters have major parts to play (the former, an insurance man, learning something new about risk and the latter exhibiting the spunkiness of old age), all of them have at least some opportunity to lend their characters’ peculiar talents to dangerous situations.

Banderas and Colman, meanwhile, throw themselves into the wacky spirit of things.  He revels in Cabot’s mixture of preening charm and diabolical avarice, seizing on the chance to do a Guinness or Sellers in playing his multiple ancestors.  And she has a field day camping it up as the nun who all too fully justifies Mrs. Bird’s suspicions.  If the rest of the film weren’t so good, she’d be accused of stealing it.  Stay around for a post-credit scene featuring an old friend/enemy from an earlier installment.

The technical team continues to make this a visually engaging franchise.  The visual effects team supervised by Alexis Wajsbrot and the animators led by Pablo Grillo do expert work, while the production design (Andy Kelly), costumes (Charlotte Walter) and makeup (Sian Miller) are all parts of a colorful package given cartoonishly artificial luster by cinematographer Erik A. Wilson.  Editor Úna Ní Dhonghaíle keeps things moving at a sprightly clip, and Dario Marianelli’s score, alternately bouncy and sweet, is appealingly right.

The effortless enchantment of the first two “Paddington” movies isn’t fully recaptured here, but enough remains to make this another winner in a series that, one hopes, will see another installment when its star turns seventy.                  

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CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD

Producers: Kevin Faige and Nate Moore  Director: Julius Onah   Screenplay: Rob Edwards, Malcolm Spellman, Dalan Musson, Julius Onah and Peter Glanz   Cast: Anthony Mackie, Danny Ramirez, Harrison Ford, Tim Blake Nelson, Shira Haas, Carl Lumbly, Xosha Roquemore, Giancarlo Esposito, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, William Mark McCullough, Takehiro Hira, Liv Tyler and Sebastian Stan   Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures 

Grade: C-

If you remember how fascinating the trade negotiations were in “The Phantom Menace,” you’ll have some idea of how dreary the central plot point of this entry in the MCU is.  “Captain America: Brave New World” is focused around newly-elected US President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford)’s push to get other world leaders, especially Japanese Prime Minister Ozaki (Takehiro Hira), behind a pact to share the supply of the harder-than-vibranium element adamantium found in a “celestial mass” in the Indian Ocean.  (If you want to investigate its origin, watch “The Eternals” again, if you dare subject yourself to that bomb a second time.)

But the adamantium is really a MacGuffin in the unwieldy screenplay cobbled together by no fewer than five scribes.  It’s merely one link in a complicated chain devised by the villain, a scientist named Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson).  For his origin, the reference point is the “The Incredible Hulk” (2008), in which, almost as an afterthought, he comes into contact with a substance that begins his transformation into what he is now—a nasty green-tinged fellow who wears his brain atop his head, a sign of the super intelligence that allows him to confect intricate plans by predicting how events will unfold.  He seethes with a desire for revenge against Ross, who, in his previous role as a gung-ho general, made Sterns what he is today.  That revenge indirectly involves The Hulk, whom Ross had spent his former career fixated on. 

So how does Captain America—or rather Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), the new CA who inherited the shield, though not the superpowers, of Steve Rogers (see “The Avengers: Endgame,” and the Disney series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”)—fit into things?  Well, he’s introduced leading a group on a mission to rescue hostages being held by Seth Voelker (Giancarlo Esposito), who’s there to sell a canister of stolen Japanese adamantium to a mysterious Buyer (shortly revealed as Sterns) as well as, it appears, to kill CA.  Cap is helped in foiling Voelker by an eager sidekick, soldier and computer wiz Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), who has taken on the role of The Falcon, Wilson’s previous costumed persona.

After their triumph Wilson and Torres are invited to the White House for the treaty-signing ceremony despite the President’s previous hostility to superheroes.  Wilson insists on bringing his old friend Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), like Torres an alumnus of the Disney series, who holds a grudge against Ross for abusing him in the super soldier program.

Then all heck breaks loose as Bradley, along with four other gunmen, attempt to assassinate Ross at the ceremony, disrupting the entire agreement.  Ross desperately tries to salvage things, only to encounter additional obstacles and growing increasingly agitated in the process: only emergency doses of pills keep him going. 

But those pills, it turns out, are just another part of Sterns’s convoluted scheme to reveal Ross for the monster he is (or rather was), a fact that continues to estrange him from his daughter Betty (Liv Tyler).  It’s up to Captain America and Falcon to save the day when the American and Japanese militaries are at point of war in the Indian Ocean. 

But that doesn’t short-circuit Sterns’s nefarious plot, in which Cap must confront a red Ross in fully Hulky form among DC’s cherry blossoms.  One wonders why Sterns, whose predictive powers are supposed to be astounding and has developed a mechanism of mind control as well (thus his army of minions), has had to resort to such an elaborate series of interconnected events to achieve this result, but if he didn’t, the movie could have been shorter than even its two-hour running-time, mercifully brief for one of these MCU pictures.

As this precis should make clear, an acquaintance with previous installments of the MCU, both large and small-screen versions, is integral to understanding the whys and wherefores of “Brave New World,” but the effort is hardly worth it.  For the most part the movie is another tedious slog in the Marvel superhero sausage factory.  Under Julius Onah’s prosaic direction, the expository scenes don’t have much oomph, and the action sequences, filled with less-than-stellar CGI, are pretty pedestrian too.  The technical crew–production designer Ramsey Avery, cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau, editors Madeleine Gavin and Matthew Schmidt, as well as the effects army—go big and splashy in the naval confrontation scene and the final battle between Cap and the thing Ross has become, but even here the result looks second-rate, and the booming tones of Laura Karpman’s score are more notable for decibels than impact.

One feels for Mackie and Ford (replacing the late William Hurt as Ross), both of whom give all they have to put across the pedestrian material.  Mackie strikes all the right heroic poses, but the banal dialogue sabotages his best efforts, while Ford huffs and puffs with such intensity that you might actually worry about the strain the octogenarian is putting on himself.  Ramirez brings some much-needed fun to the proceedings even if his verbal interjections are juvenile and Lumbly brings some gravity to his psychologically bruised veteran, but Nelson has nothing to lean on but his unflattering makeup and Esposito just smirks and glares his way through Voelker’s smugness.  Others given little opportunity to shine include Shira Haas as Ross’ hard-nosed security head who becomes Wilson’s ally, Xosha Roquemore as an aide to the President who feeds Cap information, William Mark McCullough as an army commander he can always rely on, and Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson as one of Voelker’s brutal enforcers.

“Brave New World” is the thirty-fifth feature episode of the MCU, which of course also makes use of other formats in constructing its elaborate fantasy world.  It’s not as bad as some previous installments, but far from good, and it certainly doesn’t bode well for the promised reemergence of the Avengers to which it serves as an introduction.  Even the most devoted fans will find it a letdown.