All of that is equally true of Bridget Jones’s Baby as well, although Maguire did not direct the sorry first sequel, Bridget is no longer the compulsive diarist she then was, and the triangle includes at least one new angle.
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Jack Quant (Patrick Dempsey), an American tech billionaire who has leveraged his match-making algorithm into a successful dating app, is the flawless new mistake, as opposed to old mistake Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the fussbudget workaholic lawyer with whom things never worked out. He remains a stiff, but not enough of one to resist a night of unplanned lust with Bridget. It doesn’t matter, says her crisply efficient obstetrician (Emma Thompson, a breath of bracing fresh air in this puffy movie): “All they’re good for is fitting vehicle seats and blaming things on”. To my mind, that whole Jane Austen thing was never more than a weak hook in the Bridget story.
There have been reviews saying that the second installment of the film was a disaster, but the team behind the movies has made a great success with the recent “Bridget Jones’s Baby”, especially adding McDreamy in the storyline, which is what Patrick Dempsey has been known for to his fans.
‘The script says, “X stands next to Bridget, Y stands next to Bridget“.
In comparison, “Bridget Jones’s Diary” was met with 66 from Metacritic and 81% from Rotten Tomatoes, while interquel “Edge of Reason” accrued 44 and 27% respectively. And so for a dozen years, Bridget was left abandoned and unmourned. Never once does the film treat the child inside Bridget like a burden, but rather the situation she finds herself in.
Renee Zellweger went back to school when she took a hiatus from Hollywood. A 2004 sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, provided a poor answer, stranding Bridget in a Thai prison while letting Daniel and Mark revive their rivalry. She’s looking at a lonely future. Surely movies-even those of a bygone era where people actually knew what a “record scratch” was-didn’t really use the record scratch as storytelling shorthand for “wait, whaaaaat?” She can be a big kid at work, but she values professional integrity above dignity.
Just after Bridget Jones delivers her baby, her doctor calls both Mark and Jack away to reveal to them which of them is the father. Right (again) than with Jones, thanks in large part to Renée Zellweger.
Dempsey earlier told WSVN that he had quite a challenging role to fill because audiences are already acquainted with Bridget and Mark, so they might be wary of his newcomer.
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When Bridget discovers she’s pregnant, she learns, a bit too late, that condoms have a best-before date.
