Renee Zellweger will be back in theaters Friday in Bridget Jones’s Baby, but the return to the role comes after the Oscar victor took a long vacation – her last big screen role was in 2010’s My Own Love Song.
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Part of what’s so refreshing about “Bridget Jones’s Baby” is that at 43, Bridget is effortlessly desirable, sexy, adventurous, and yes, adorable. They bookmark the heroine’s trials and vacillations with nostalgic flashbacks to earlier films reminding us of Bridget’s infuriating obsessions with Colin Firth and Hugh Grant’s paramours.
Bridget Jones’s Baby hits theatres from 14 September (16).
Yet based on this lackluster outing, it’s not unreasonable to hope that Bridget’s kid has grown up considerably before anyone seeks to pry open her diary again.
In a span of one week she has a fling with a billionaire Internet match-maker played by Patrick Dempsey and a reunion fling with Mr. Darcy, played by the like-able Colin Firth.
As with Jones, I missed Zellweger on-screen more than I thought I did, especially in this type of role, playing flawed, down-to-earth women who aren’t flawed just because they say they are, but because they feel like the same type of hot mess I can be.
And what, we wonder, would Bridget be getting up to in a fourth movie?
“Bridget Jones’s Baby” also does something that not many films this year have made me do: smile.
It turns out a lengthy break is just what this series needed to find its footing after the manic missteps of 2004’s “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason“, which fell into some of the common traps of sequels looking to up the stakes.
Back to Bridget, who admittedly is trapped in one of the hoariest premises in the romantic comedy playbook: She doesn’t know which of the two men she recently had impulse sex with is the father, and never mind that this could be settled with a quick scrape of DNA.
Thompson nabs several of the best lines as Bridget’s despairing obstetrician, including a one-liner that advises expectant fathers against witnessing the miracle of birth firsthand. ‘It could be interesting to watch her improvising her way through motherhood. She walks away from that, too, and continues on with life until she gets the news that she’s pregnant.
This who’s-your-daddy plot device is employed to create misdirection and misunderstanding laughs, finding her two suitors in a game of one-upsmanship with sight gags galore. Zellweger plays Bridget just as charmingly as she always has – flawed but endearing; just right in her own idiosyncratic way. Emma Thompson, who helped co-write the script, is another brilliant newcomer as Bridget’s midwife, and she provides a lot of laughs.
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The movie’s greatest misstep – other than Dempsey’s boring romantic foil – is that, at one point, Bridget flashes back to events from the first movie. I’ll wager that in the sequel yet to come, Bridget will renegotiate Brexit, with Darcy as her legal eagle.
