Paddington

Adapting the much-loved Paddington Bear stories into a feature film is the kind of idea that’s both inevitable and yet really something to get excited about. Paddington is a fairly low-key character, and they don’t really thrive in a cinema environment. Yet so long as you’re willing to loosen your grip on the Paddington of the books, there’s a lot to enjoy here… even if it does at times feel a lot closer to a generic kids adventure film than the source material.
After an introduction designed to give Paddington (a CGI creation voiced by Ben Whishaw) a reason to leave his home of Peru and visit London, he ends up alone at Paddington Station. His expectations of British hospitality (largely formed by a family encounter with an explorer back in the 1920s) is not exactly jibing with the current-day world. There the Brown family – Mr (Hugh Bonneville), Mrs (Sally Hawkins), Judy (Madeleine Harris) and Jonathan (Samuel Joslin) find him and offer – reluctantly in Mr Brown’s case – to give him a home for the night so he can continue his search for the explorer he’s come to visit.
As is so often the way in these films, the Brown family seem to be missing that special something that would bring them together as a family: could a wacky slapstick bear be that special someone? That kind of gentle story isn’t enough to hang a movie on these days, even with Paddington’s big comedy sequences like flooding the bathroom by mistake, so a subplot about a sinister museum staffer (Nicole Kidman, having a lot of fun hamming it up) looking to stuff Paddington is thrown into the mix, and if you’re even remotely a Paddington purist all this might be starting to sound like a nightmare.
Fortunately the film manages to do a decent job of capturing the bear’s gentle yet bearish nature and while there are action sequences they’re often very Wallace and Grommit in tone, which is not a bad thing. Perhaps more importantly, it’s actually funny right the way through: it has its flaws, but as far as fun for the whole family goes this is more fun than most.
By Anthony Morris