The
real culprit—it’s revealed early on, but stop reading now if you don’t want the
“spoiler”—is a crackbrained, down-on-his-luck actor played by Hugh Grant, who
knows, as Paddington does not, that the pop-up book contains clues to the
location of a hidden treasure. So as Paddington struggles to negotiate the
perils of prison life and his upper-middle-class adoptive London family searches for evidence of his
innocence, the thespian gets closer and closer to claiming the loot.
Michael
Bond's beloved bear, with his blue coat, floppy red hat and love of marmalade,
has been a mainstay of Brit kiddie-lit since the late ‘50s. Bond, who died this
past year (Paddington 2 is dedicated
to him) claimed that the character’s inspiration came, in part, from the sight
of tagged children on railway platforms being evacuated from London during WWII.
There
have been several animated TV series based on Bond’s tales, but the first feature
film was a 2014 live-action effort, with a CGI Paddington excellently voiced by
Ben Wishaw. That movie had plenty of charm, but it was marred, for me severely,
by the introduction of a Cruella de Vil-like villainess played by Nicole
Kidman, an obsessed taxidermist who, lacking a specimen of Ursa Marmalada in her collection, wanted to stuff Paddington. This nastiness felt really out of place in the
gentle context of the movie.
Paddington 2 is a major improvement.
Directed, like the first film, by Paul King of the marvelous Brit TV comedy The Mighty Boosh, the sequel features
lengthy, complex slapstick sequences in the sprit of Buster Keaton or Jacques
Tati, executed by Paddington (Wishaw again) with similarly earnest absorption.
And its softer and sillier villain hits just the right note, without taking too
much of an edge off the picture. It does, after all, contain the line, spoken
by a security guard at St. Paul’s,
“A nun went beserk.”
And
that cast! Returning from the first film are Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville,
Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi and Jim Broadbent, joined here by the likes of
Brendan Gleeson, as Paddington’s tough-guy prison mentor, Tom Conti, Joanna
Lumley and Eileen Atkins, billed here as Dame Eileen Atkins, if you please.
It’s a testament to the bear’s iconic status over there that that sort of
a-list talent could be assembled for a kiddie-movie sequel.
Stealing
the picture from all of them is Grant, who turns his no-good greedy ham into a
star part. He gets to use a variety of accents and wear cunning
disguises—including as that aforementioned “very attractive nun.” He even gets
to perform a full Sondheim number.
The
Commuter—Liam Neeson plays a 60-year-old ex-cop turned insurance salesman who
rides a commuter train from Tarrytown to Manhattan
and back everyday. Heading home on the day he gets laid off, baffled by how he’ll
send his son to college, he’s approached by a mystery woman (Vera Farmiga) with
a proposition—somebody on the train doesn’t belong, she says.
He’s
given a false name that the person is traveling under (he isn’t told the gender),
and promised that he’ll be given $100,000 if, using his cop skills, he
makes the identification for them. In a moment of weakness he takes the down
payment, but quickly realizes that the people who have hired him are ruthless killers,
and that he’d be dooming their target by making the ID. He also realizes that his
own family is in danger.
Directed
by Jaume Collet-Serra, the Spaniard behind 2015’s Run All Night and several other Liam Neeson righteous/reluctant
killing sprees, this thriller pays obvious tribute to Hitchcock—overtly to Shadow of a Doubt—but is just as
reminiscent of the Bruckheimer-style action excess playbook. The plot gets more
convoluted, and the action more ludicrously overscaled, as the movie
progresses.
But
as usual, there’s Neeson at the center of it, with his quiet masculinity and his
decency and his pained, sad-faced acceptance of the distasteful duty of pulverizing
his enemies—it’s distasteful to him, that is; we in the audience drool for their
retribution. He’s an action hero for middle-aged guys who feel ineffectual, and
he delivers again here.
On
the whole, The Commuter is more fun
than many of Neeson’s other massacres. It doesn’t take itself too seriously,
and it’s generous-hearted: especially in a Spartacus-like
climatic flourish, it’s about strangers sticking up for each other.
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