The actress reprises her role as the hapless, unlucky-in-love Bridget for the third film in the franchise, reuniting onscreen with Colin, who plays Mark Darcy, and appearing alongside series newcomer Patrick, who portrays the British actor’s new love rival, Jack Qwant. But a week later, she also sleeps with Mark.
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Renee Zellweger attends the “Bridget Jones Baby” New York Premiere at Paris Theater on September 12, 2016 in New York City. (Could those be the same pajama bottoms she wore in Bridget Jones’s Diary?) Zellweger’s voice-over strikes the familiar self-excoriating tone as Bridget reminds herself of the gap between aspirations and outcome.
Zellweger is deft at physical comedy, whether she is stumbling through mud or fumbling through a work presentation, but she also brings a sweetness to Bridget that makes it hard not to side with her even when she makes awful choices. It had the ideal success story as the ultimate low budget smash, was one of the first films to make it big from Internet word of mouth and viral marketing, and was the rare horror hit without graphic gore or a masked killer.
Bridget is now shockingly slim, in her 40s, and has been single since she split from Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) five years before. Bridget is good at her job, less diet conscious, and ready to take on the challenges of turning 43.
But the script never fails Zellweger, giving her every opportunity to have naughty fun with girlfriends (Sarah Solemani as her news anchor sidekick is a hoot) as well as heartfelt moments with family (Jim Broadbent as her dad, solid as a rock).
Talking about her decision to go on hiatus from Hollywood, she added: “I just wanted to shift my focus a little bit and keep some promises that I had made to myself a long time ago”.
Despite being main star of the “Bridget Jones” franchise and an Oscar victor, Renee managed to enjoy her break from the limelight without being hassled by the public. “There’s such a sweetness to who she is, such as purity to who she is as a person, that I wasn’t really thinking ‘Tart'”.
She packed on pounds and tamed her Texas twang into a London lilt to land the title role in the 2001 hit Bridget Jones’s Diary, bringing to the big screen the antic goings-on of novelist Helen Fielding’s flannel-wearing, wine-tippling and sad-song-wailing singleton.
Running time: 2 hours, 2 mins. With many films nowadays recycling the same jokes and rewording jokes to make themselves seem funnier than they actually are, “Bridget Jones’s Baby” is a film that revels completely in the small things in life, finding cute and charming ways to make things hilarious from it.
All signs have pointed towards the latest Bridget Jones movie being a total disaster – but that’s not the narrative that is ultimately written.
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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. This is Bridget’s story, and the man is just gravy. She’s a woman who has finally grown into her own skin. In fact, both Bridget Jones’s Baby and Blair Witch started the week with a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Baby doing so through over twice as many reviews as Blair Witch’s.
