Weekend Watch: ‘Paddington 2’

Weekend Watch is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better. 

What to Stream This Weekend

Movie: Paddington 2
Director: Paul King
Starring: Ben Whishaw (voice), Hugh Grant, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville
Available on: Amazon Prime and iTunes

It’s hard to trust people. Just in general. We can’t read other people’s minds, for one, and it often feels naive to trust their good intentions. Intentions are often bad! Or cynical! Or self-serving! So when I say that I deeply distrusted the critical waves of support for Paddington 2 at the beginning of the year, know how serious I’m being. All these grown adults just decided on the same day that not only was Paddington 2 supposed to be good, but it was great. And not just great, the greatest. And not just the greatest, but “Hugh Grant getting a BAFTA nomination”-level great. It all felt so very performative. That in a world bullet-training directly to hell, where we wade through the muck of Twitter and Facebook every day, where the seas are actually rising, and where a heavily-armed American populace seems bound and determined to take turns shooting up most of the rest of us, this cute little movie about a sweet, kind-hearted bear so shorted out our miserablist little circuits, and suddenly everybody went wildly over-the-top with praise, because we’ve all forgotten how to modulate tones and superlatives.

Anyway, I have come to you today having finally watched Paddington 2 on VOD, and it is my pleasant surprise to confirm that Paddington truly IS a very good bear, and that his adventure in this perfectly-toned, silly and sweet movie about marmalade and the ways in which we shun outsiders. If you missed the first Paddington, you can catch yourselves up with these two sentences: Paddington is a sweet bear who grew up with his Uncle Pastuzo and Aunt Lucy. After Pastuzo is killed during an earthquake, Lucy sends Paddington off to live in London, where he finds and eventually is welcomed in by the Brown family. Oh, also Nicole Kidman was an evil taxidermist, and Paddington loves marmalade. There, you’re caught up.

In the sequel, which makes the correct assumption that the Paddington universe could use more candy-colored whimsy (the color pallette and visual design kept reminding me of The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I wasn’t mad about it). It’s a marvelously simple story: Paddington wants to save up to buy a book for his Aunt Lucy’s 100th birthday; while he tries (and mostly fails) at various jobs around London, the book is stolen by an in-disguise Hugh Grant, playing self-obsessed ACK-tor Phoenix Buchanan. Paddington is framed for the crime and ends up in prison, and that’s where the bulk of the movie takes place. Yes, the sweetest and happiest movie of the year is for the most part a prison movie.

Paddington does his best to make friends in prison, but its hard. He eventually wins over the loyalty of the prison cook, Knuckles McGinty (a wonderful Brendan Gleeson), despite initially running afoul by insulting the food. This, by the way, is exactly a storyline from Orange Is the New Black, though that’s pretty much the only area where Paddington 2 and Orange Is the New Black intersect. Knuckles and his gang eventually escape the prison, taking Paddington with them, and suddenly it’s a race him to clear his name.

Of course, the plot in Paddington is almost entirely beside the point. This is a movie about mood and comfort. A movie about unexpected lessons (being welcoming and a good neighbor are the two most important themes in the film). As voiced by Ben Whishaw, Paddington is not just some ursine naif running around London, Gump-ing his way through the lives of his neighbors, foiling crimes unwittingly as he bends down to pick up a nickel. But there’s a central kindness, to Paddington and to all of relationships establishes. Often, niceness or even kindness is painted in a movie as the absence of things like cruelty or malice. Paddington is the rare movie that pushes goodness as a guiding principle.

Hugh Grant, meanwhile, is having the absolute time of his life, indulging in every pompous-actor trope, and taking on all the requisite aliases, wigs, prosthetics of his various disguises as if they were quick-changes in Macbeth. He’s a delightful ham in a role that encourages it at every turn.

Paddington 2 is a romp! It’s a delight. You might still be resisting it, because it feels like grown adults shouldn’t enthuse this way about a children’s property. But this is the rare all-ages triumph, and one you would be fully justified in renting this weekend.

Where to stream Paddington 2