The fitfully amusing, intermittently entertaining screenplay by Dan Mazer, Fielding, and Emma Thompson – the latter also playing a supporting role as Bridget’s brusque obstetrician – is based not on the series’ third book (Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy), but instead on a number of independent columns by Fielding and it manages to stand alone sufficiently for viewers who haven’t seen the earlier installments.
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It’s been 12 years since we saw Renee Zellweger in the disappointing sequel, so it’s nice to see her back again making us laugh in, “Bridget Jones’s Baby”, a consistently amusing movie. The awkward scenarios she manages to get herself into feel completely contrived at every turn.
Who would you like to see Bridget end up with? The new world in which we find Bridget is no more technological or less technological than the world we find ourselves in, which makes picking up, even if it is so much later, so much easier and completely lovely.
Rather than purely focusing on work, Renee is now aiming to strike a good balance between filming and her home life, and the Oscar-winner, who’s been dating musician Doyle Bramhall II since 2012, finds she’s much happier with her life these days. In romantic comedies, it’s so hard to find characters that not only are relatable, but are realistic. Much of the humor of the film comes from Bridget trying to hedge her bets, unsure of the father’s identity.
Much has been made about the way Zellweger looks now. Her stellar performance was buoyed by an extraordinary cast. She falls in some mud, but she also gets the attention of Jack (Patrick Dempsey). Yes, that Emma Thompson, who contributes a hilarious cameo.
She relished the time off, she told Kelly Ripa and her Live with Kelly guest co-host Neil Patrick Harris.
Now she’s back in Bridget Jones’s Baby, which sounds godawful in title and concept – but which in execution is a fizzy delight. The one flaw of the movie is that it overdoses on cuteness instead of taking the braver path of discussing birth control and abortion on screen. It certainly would have been in character for the uptight Mr. Darcy. Both Mark and Jack are keen to be the father of Bridget’s baby, so until testing confirms paternity, both men do their best to step up, courting Bridget and accompanying her to prenatal classes. It is absolutely inconceivable that Bridget, a single 43-year-old pregnant woman, never considers terminating her pregnancy even if she eventually rejected it. It is 2016 not 1950. She’s still awkward and prone to embarrassing foibles, but is older, wiser, comfortable in her own skin.
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Years of watching movies and studying the entertainment industry reveal certain patterns suggesting a feature’s path towards victory or failure, and director Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Baby is a film entering theaters chock full of warning signs. Sweet, slight and fitfully amusing, it’s a movie admirers of the earlier films should mildly enjoy, but cast in terms any new parent can understand, isn’t worth the price of a sitter.
