Bridget is no outsider: She’s a straight, white, middle class, university-educated woman with a London apartment, a media job and a gaggle of friends. Kate O’Flynn turns in a broad comic performance as Bridget’s hostile new boss, Alice Peabody, whose solution to everything is more cat videos.
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Bridget Jone’s Baby opened in cinemas on Friday (September 16th). Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey) now occupies that corner of the love triangle: He’s a charming, cocksure American tech mogul who knows how to pitch woo. Seeing her struggle with societal expectations as a 43-year-old makes more sense and is more gratifying than it was in her 30s because there’s always been something old-fashioned about Bridget.
Though the perfection couldn’t last, Bridget Jones’s Baby is getting far better responses from critics than the franchise’s first sequel. If anything, Bridget Jones’s Baby faces an even bigger challenge: How do you get audiences to care about the same heroine going through the same troubles with men 17 years later? (A character based on Pride & Prejudice’s Lizzy Bennet can’t not end up with the guy named Darcy.) Still, there’s something so comforting about returning to Jones’ routine of lovably failed self-improvement.
What follows is a slightly overlong sitcom as Bridget tries to juggle two potential dads until a paternity test can decide, but the cast makes even the routine stuff sparkle. Her old love Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) is married. She has a tryst with Dempsey’s banal online-dating guru at a music festival one week, only to hook up with her ex Darcy the next. As it can be recalled, the second movie ended with Bridget remaining single. (Knocked Up had a similar plot issue.) High jinks, of course, ensue.
Zellweger had the ideal success story as an American actress who transformed her voice and her body to play an overweight British woman stumbling to find love.
“It was time”, Zellweger said recently in Santa Monica, California, near her home. That doesn’t happen all that much on-screen. “Weight: who cares?” she types in her ubiquitous diary around Christmastime, when she’s rounding the bend on nine months pregnant.
It’s been over a decade since Bridget Jones last went through an embarrassing series of personal and professional mishaps on the way to learning that opposites attract after all.
Unlike Bridget Jones’s Baby, Blair Witch tried to come out of nowhere just like its predecessor did.
We find Bridget celebrating her 43rd birthday, alone again – and with child.
She finally has to grow up and play the role of adult; she has to learn how to share her life with a man and a baby; she must, as she says, make new mistakes, and not the same old miscues.
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Director Sharon Maguire (reprising that role from the original) wrings what humor she can from what feels like an awfully familiar, bordering-on-tired premise for a romantic comedy.
