Paddington 2 Review

The year 2017 is in the books on this blog. Sure, there are a few final best picture nominees that I still plan on reviewing and of course I will be doing my annual Oscar predictions post right before the Oscars in early March, but I officially have my best and worst movies of 2017 lists posted, so now it's time to put the main focus on 2018 and what a better way to start than with this absolutely delightful "Paddington" sequel! As far as the other 2018 new releases go, I do plan on eventually getting to "The Commuter," "12 Strong" and "Maze Runner: The Death Cure," but I make no specific promises. What I don't plan on getting to is "Den of Thieves," "Proud Mary" or "Insidious: The Last Key." I simply have zero interest in those three movies and with plenty on the docket to see right now, they'll most likely be left in the dust. Sorry. That's just how life goes sometimes. But "Paddington 2" was the January movie that I was super excited for. I actually saw it nearly two weeks ago, but had other priorities on this blog, specifically with the end of year lists, but with those out of the way, it's time for me to gush about this adorable British bear and how simply wonderful this movie is. With two absolutely phenomenal family films in the books, this is becoming one of the best family film franchises.

This biggest thing that I've heard from a lot of my American friends is that they thought the first "Paddington" looked dumb, so they skipped it. Those same people are also claiming they are skipping this sequel because it also looks dumb. Every time a friend tells me that, I have to strongly resist the urge to grab them by the shoulders and shake the living daylights out of them in order to knock some sense into them. The first "Paddington" got a 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with 141 reviews counted and this sequel currently stands at a perfect 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes 172 reviews counted. That's the highest reviewed movie EVER on Rotten Tomatoes, from a certain point of view. It's the most reviews counted for a movie that stayed at 100 percent. A record that "Lady Bird" had late last year before a Grinch finally gave it a negative review. Thus the record went back to "Toy Story 2" before "Paddington 2" then took it back away. If you hate Rotten Tomatoes, both movies got an A on Cinemascore and both have high audiences scores on various other sites, like IMDb. Regardless of how you look at it, people who have seen these movies have loved them. Yet you refuse to even give them a chance because "they looked dumb"? C'mon man!

OK, fine. Whatever. Rant over. I suppose we can credit some of that undeserved hate from ignorant Americans who refuse to give this franchise a chance on the fact that these are British movies intended first and foremost for a British audience. I mean, that's where Paddington came from. He first showed up in a kid's book in 1958 written by British author Michael Bond. The various Paddington books have since sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. The first T.V. series for Paddington began on BBC in 1975 and has been widely successful for many years. The first Paddington movie was released in 2014 in the U.K. and made $64 million there. Compare that to the U.S. total of $76 million a few months later in early 2015. And Google tells me we have around five times the population. So far, "Paddington 2," released in November 2016 in the U.K., has made $57 million there compared to just $26 million here in the U.S. after two weeks of release. The latter is a crime to humanity in my opinion, but if it's pleasing its target audience and making money over in the U.K., then I suppose I can't complain too much. They even gave "Paddington 2" three BAFTA nominations, which included outstanding British film.

Why is this such a beloved movie? For me it centers around Paddington himself, who is such a lovable character. He has an adorable innocence to him as he's always looking for the good in everyone and doing his best to make a difference in the world while living as good of a life as he can. This right here provides a solid message for kids watching the movie to live a good life and be a good human being. Then we have the good-natured humor that comes with Paddington's innocence of being an anthropomorphic bear living in the human world in London, not fully understanding exactly how the human world works, but doing his absolute best. This leads to a lot of clean, fun humor that will have all the kids and the adults on the floor rolling in laughter. If you are tired of all the recent kids movies relying heavily on poop, butt and fart jokes to make the kids laugh, then Paddington is a franchise you need to turn to because they don't have any of that extremely low form of humor. Yeah, sure, your six-year-old will laugh hysterically at all the fart jokes in the other movies, but why rely on those movies when the Paddington movies will make them laugh just as hard with clean humor? And the joy of it all is that the jokes aren't just for kids as the adults will be laughing, too.

Paddington also goes through quite the character arc in this movie. As the story goes, all he wants to do in this movie is get a special gift for his Aunt Lucy's 100th birthday. While browsing through an antique shop, he finds an elaborate pop-up book of London that he decides he wants to give to his Aunt Lucy since she's never been to London. The problem is the book is a little more expensive than Paddington can afford, so he does odd jobs around the city to earn money and has almost earned enough when one day he notices a thief in the antique shop stealing the book, so Paddington chases him down, but is unsuccessful as the thief does a disappearing act last second, leaving Paddington framed for the crime, putting him on trial and sending him to prison. The big character arc with this is that Paddington has to learn the hard way that sometimes the world isn't as good and perfect as he thought it was, but yet being the great bear he is, he tries to make the absolute best out of every situation, being the best prisoner that he can be while putting his full trust in his family back home that they will figure out a way to prove his innocence and get him out of prison. This is a lovely arc with great messages that adds quite a bit of depth and emotion to this already fun film.

There's a lot of care and precision given to this movie on every level. Without even knowing much about director Paul King, outside the fact that he did a great job with both of these movies, I can tell that he really cares about this subject matter and really wants to do this material justice and give people who love the Paddington books and T.V. shows the series of movies that they deserve and can share with their family and kids for years to come. This is a very well-directed movie with a great three-act structure. The intro I described to you in my summary makes for a great first act as it sets up the story quite well. I won't say what happens in the second or third acts, but the second act is absolutely delightful and had me laughing so hard while the third act takes you on quite the wild ride while ending in a very touching way that nearly brought tears to my eyes. And don't you dare leave when the credits start rolling because there's a mid-credits scene that might be the best scene of the movie. In addition to all the directing and writing being perfect, the acting is spot-on from everyone involved. None of the actors are here just to collect a paycheck. They are all fully invested in providing families for years to come with an absolutely delightful film.

The best way for me to summarize "Paddington 2" is that it's the perfect family film. To quantify that statement, I'm not saying this is the absolute perfect, flawless film overall. But in terms of everything you want or expect from a family film, this does everything it needs to do. It's extremely hard to make a great family film. Paul King did just that three years ago with "Paddington." It's even harder to make a sequel to a family film that's just as good, if not better. Yet Paul King ALSO did that with "Paddington 2." In fact, over the last week or so, I've been trying to come up with a comparison for this franchise and the best one I can think of is the "Toy Story" franchise. Those are three movies that I would similarly qualify as perfect families because they do everything they need to in order to successfully entertain family audiences. All three movies are very solid individual movies that stand on their own and all three of them are about on the same level. It's impressive what they've done and we can only hope that continues with "Toy Story 4" next year. We've only had two "Paddington" movies so far, but both of them are absolutely solid films. I don't even know which one I like more, so I'm going to play it safe and reward this sequel the same score as I did the first - a 9/10.