It turns out a little break is just what this series needed to find its footing after the manic missteps of “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason”, which fell into some of the all too common traps of sequels looking to up the stakes (hello, Thailand prison sequence).
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In this third installment of the Bridget Jones franchise – a movie nobody necessarily asked for, especially since the last movie wasn’t particularly well received – Bridget is once again single.
The magic is back when our clumsy but lovable heroine (Renee Zellweger) finds herself caught in another love triangle. Her posse of lunatic friends have gotten lives and retreated to the movie’s back burner. Alone after losing Mark, she attends an outdoor music festival and stumbles into the yurt of Jack Qwant (Dempsey). It’s a fitting end to Bridget’s cinematic adventures and the producers should leave it there. In the end, there were several times I thought, “Here’s the reason there won’t be a third one” or why I can’t do a third one and blah blah blah. She has stopped smoking, cut down on the wine, doesn’t obsess so much about her weight and the ever-present self-help books have been replaced with political literature. Her two male suitors are both great in this film. The jokes reference beloved scenes from the first film, but it never feels like a re-hash of old material (they even manage to draw laughs from a dated reference to “Gangnam Style”). In the movies, we can enjoy escaping reality for a while.
Renee, who hasn’t starred as Bridget Jones since 2004, admitted that although she was slightly terrified when returning to the role – she had so much fun. She didn’t work on the second film, so her deft touch was obviously missed. While the plot is not exactly logical, it has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. The only thing that works in this mess is Emma Thompson at her very best as the obstetrician.
All signs have pointed towards the latest Bridget Jones movie being a total disaster – but that’s not the narrative that is ultimately written. Kate O’Flynn plays a controlling younger boss who wants to make their news programs more entertaining. I hope to think that everyone can see a bit of Bridget in themsleves, I know I certainly do. The film sees Renée Zellweger and Colin Firth joined by Patrick Dempsey.
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The film lacks Hugh Grant’s naughty playboy Daniel Cleaver, which going in seems like a fatal missing ingredient to the Bridget Jones chemistry – who is going to advise Bridget to “invest in lockable knickers?” 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.
