The fourth Bridget Jones movie manages to deliver a greatest hits package as well as bittersweet lessons in love and life
if "don't bore us - get to the chorus" and "play the ruddy hits" is what we all truly want when we go to see a reunited band in concert, then the new Bridget Jones movie is the most classic greatest hits sequel in decades.
This is Bridget in excelsis (and hideous undies) - there are pratfalls, inopportune emotional outbursts, wine swigged straight from the bottle (although only once), ill-advised romantic entanglements and, praise the lord, the return of Hugh Grant as louche old rogue Daniel Cleaver.
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Watch our interview with Renée Zellweger, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Leo Woodall
Bounding about like a scatty rabbit, Renée Zellweger unearths all the easter eggs that fans of the films and books could possibly wish for. But for all that, we do meet a different Bridget in this fourth and, apparently, final chapter.
She now lives in a colourful, tumbledown old house in, of course, Hampstead Heath, where she is raising her two children, nine-year-old Billy and precocious four-year-old Mabel, who seems to be based on Outnumbered's Karen Brockman.
However, ten years after the last (misfiring) film, Bridget is now a 51-year-old widow following the death of her husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) after he was killed in Sudan on a humanitarian mission. She’s putting a brave face on things as all her friends look on in matey concern.
As director Michael Morris says, this is a comedy about grief - not so much romcom as sob-com.
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Watch our interview with Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy director, Michael Morris
Bridget calls herself "unviable" but don't bother applying the Bechdel test here - after much cajoling from her friends, she ventures back into a much changed dating game of Tinder, ghosting, and swiping left. Up on Hamstead Heath, she first encounters Roxster (One Day star Leo Woodall), a park ranger and aspiring garbologist, who becomes her toy boy after he rescues her and her errant kids from a tree.
In what is a VERY on the nose homage to Colin Firth's lake dunking in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Woodall nearly steals the whole film in a standout scene involving a swimming pool and a dog in distress.
12 Years and a Slave and Children of Men actor Chiwetel Ejiofor brings a touch of class to proceedings as Mr Wallaker, a grindingly logical but extremely hot science teacher whose analytical outlook on life is in very sharp contrast to Bridget’s organised chaos.
Meanwhile, her former lover, the now reformed and crumpled Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, still a force of nature in the role), flits in an out of her life to babysit her kids and offer a shoulder to cry on; a clipped and business-like Emma Thompson is good value as Bridget’s exasperated gynaecologist; and there are come nice exchanges between our all too human heroine and her parents (Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent).
It’s all set in an intentionally idealised version of London, infused with Richard Curtis style magic hour light, and populated exclusively by good-looking people. However, prepare to throw your eyes to heaven and the Exit sign at the return of Bridget’s deeply painful friends, a bunch of mostly loud and monied London bohemians who are surgically attached to large glasses of white and who say "darling!" far too often.
The latest Bridget Jones movie is a warm and fuzzy romcom but it is also tinged with sadness and has some well observed lessons in love and ageing. Maybe in twenty years we can revisit a twinkling old Bridget in blissful retirement but this will do for now, thanks.
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