Film Review: Paddington 2

Not since I was a wee child did a fuzzy bear enter my life. Last time it happened I was about three or four years old, it was a tumultuous time and my mother bought me one wearing suspenders, ready for his days’ work, with a smile stitched between its nose and its chin. Back in those days, long ago, I was rather insecure… Just starting kindergarten, I had no friends and found myself far from home. 

This time it’s satisfying to see someone else on that side of the equation, and with Paddington in the slammer this time around, I sympathised with his displacement. Whereas in the introductory Paddington, the film’s namesake had to outrun a poacher while avoiding homelessness, this time a nefarious Broadway star has framed our favourite bear, forsaking him while the Browns are left to unriddle this conundrum. 

Carrying across several plot points from the first movie, Paddington 2 elaborates Paddington’s backstory while incorporating a modest time jump – to a point where the neighbourhood loves him, and he now rarely destroys entire properties through comical misunderstandings. Aunt Lucy’s 100th birthday changes this calm situation, pushing Paddington to get a job so he can afford a one-thousand-pound pop-up book depicting London, for it is truly the only gift suitable for a bear stuck in deepest Peru. 

The film’s antagonist, played by Hugh Grant, is a fiendish rapscallion with one too many costumes. He’s like what working with Eddie Murphy in the 90’s might have felt like, each scene there’s a different voice, different cosmetics and genders aren’t left unblurred between a few of these either. A masterful villain for a fun, family movie… a posh British bloke doubling as cockney thieves and robbers. 

That doesn’t mean this movie is not serious, all silly. Quite far from it, Paddington 2 continues on with the pestering subplot about Paddington’s family back in the forest. Now I get it, his family all but dies in a storm, with him having to abandon what little he has left for a once in a lifetime shot at exploring terrific London. This recap just pulls at my dwindling heartstrings on paper, but in film it crosses a line.

I cried during Paddington 2, and this is the first anyone’s heard about it.

I haven’t seen a movie juggle the human range of emotions with such ease in years, although I can recall one movie that did it pretty well not too long ago: Paddington [1]. The sequel is a perfect continuation of the Brown’s story, and may its reign atop the Rotten Tomatoes aggregated reviews carry forth, long into the future.