The sweet, furry hero of Paddington in Peru loves marmalade sandwiches so much that he carries one under his hat. Carrying a marmalade sandwich under his hat is so second-nature to Paddington that he completely forgets he has one under there in this movie until he needs a marmalade sandwich to get out of a…jam. Paddington in Peru is a marmalade sandwich of a movie. 

The first two films in this series, Paddington and Paddington 2, were directed by Paul King, who established the template that his replacement – music video director Dougal Wilson, in his feature debut – uses here, with idiosyncratic tweaks that give the movie its own pleasingly odd personality. As in the other two entries, the animators’ performance of Paddington and returning cast member Ben Whishaw’s vocal work set the tone and pace. The soft-spoken bear in the red-stained bucket hat is polite, easygoing, a bit literal-minded, but capable of sudden and surprising bursts of kookiness, a great friend, and incredibly committed once he’s made up his mind to do something. 

The quest here takes Paddington to Peru, where he hopes to find his beloved Aunt Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton). Lucy was living at a Home for Retired Bears when she began behaving oddly. A letter from the establishment alarms Paddington into deciding to visit her. Paddington’a adoptive family The Browns (Hugh Bonneville’s Henry; Emily Mortimer’s Mary, replacing Sally Hawkins in the role; Madeleine Harris’ Judy, and Samuel Joslin’s Jonathan) accompany him in solidarity. 

When they arrive at the Home for Retired Bears – built in what was once a mission, and headed up by The Reverend Mother (Olivia Colman) – who composes and performs a song heralding the Browns’ arrival, capped with a little tribute to The Sound of Music – they discover that Aunt Lucy has disappeared, leaving only her glasses and bracelet. A chance discovery of a map in Lucy’s room points the group toward a landmark called Rumi Rock, and onward – or so they hope – to El Dorado, the fabled, possibly nonexistent lost city of gold that consumed the lives of many explorers.

This setup is, of course, a motherlode for homages to classic jungle movies. The most dominant is John Huston’s The African Queen, wherein Katharine Hepburn’s Methodist Missionary Rose Sayer hires Humphrey Bogart’s steamboat captain Charlie Allnut to help her blow up a German U-boat. The centerpiece of Huston’s movie is a series of rides down perilous rapids, and Paddington in Peru has its own version of that. It also has its own answer to Allnut, a sweaty, exuberantly goofy boat captain named Hunter Cabot (Antonio Banderas, exactly the guy you want in a role like this) who travels the Amazon with his plucky teenage daughter Gina (Carla Tous) and can trace his lineage back through multiple generations of treasure hunters, male and female (and all played by Banderas!) including a conquistador who materialises behind Cabot to offer him advice whether he wants any or not.

But Paddington in Peru is pleasurable mainly for its just- hanging-out

-with-friends vibe, which it wears with quiet grace (even though, if the end credits are any indication, it required years’ worth of labour by hundreds of visual effects artists and animators, as well as live-action crews). It takes a special kind of all-on-the-same-page commitment to make a huge production present as an adorable little honey-drizzled dessert. This movie’s got it. It’s not trying to be anything but a slapstick comedy with a sentimental heart, and it gets into that zone immediately and stays there. 

The performers are all in the zone, though one might wish that Judy, Jonathan, and Gina were given more to do while in it. Bonneville and Mortimer have the “square, stiff-upper-lipped but essentially good-natured Brit” demeanour down to a science.

Freed from the necessity to give audiences more of what they already know they want, Colman and Banderas give capital-B Big performances – dazzling grins, unnerving laughs, boisterous energy – that paradoxically manage to seem contained and exact. If Jim Carrey’s performance opposite himself in the latest Sonic the Hedgehog is a 40-meter-wide splatter-painted mural of one man/multi-character acting, Banderas’s performances as multiple generations of gold-hunters is an art gallery full of small but exquisitely detailed sketches. Colman’s work is its own peculiar little miracle. Her flashing eyes and pearly grin are perched on the edge of manic from the first moment she appears onscreen. She’s such a steamroller of cheerful enthusiasm that she becomes a symbol of her character, an avatar representing the idea of joy. When she dances, she seems to have been possessed by the smiley-face emoji.

This is a fun movie that furthers the series’ mandate to provide one kind of entertainment for kids and another for adults. Like its esteemed predecessors in this vein, it believes in its pro-social messages – the family you seek out is as valid as the family you were born into.