Renée Zellweger returns for the legendary diary’s last chapter. Here’s our Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy review.
Like Top Gun: Maverick and Puss In Boots: The Last Wish before it, it’s doubtful anyone thought they needed a Bridget Jones 4. Since the UK’s favourite middle-class mess stumbled into cinemas in 2001, both the inevitable follow-up (The Edge Of Reason) and late-2010s revival (Baby) have struggled to recapture the original’s magic. In the nine years since we last saw Bridget, an avalanche of legacy sequels, requels, reboots and marketing slogans have us beaten into submission; do we really need another one? The answer, resoundingly, is yes.
Now, Bridget’s middle-class malaise has “oh fuck”ed its way cheerfully into the 2020s: her best friend Miranda (Sarah Solemani) complains about spending too much time in Soho House; Shazzer (Sally Phillips) has a podcast, and her new nanny (Nico Parker) has new-fangled parenting wisdom to impart. Starting work again after a four-year career gap, our hero’s new producer role on a morning magazine show keeps her working life suitably high-octane, while a muscled young gardener (One Day’s Leo Woodall) and her son’s disciplinarian science teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) keep her private life suitably steamy.
That this potentially insufferable sequence of words turns into anything other than a car crash is a minor miracle. That the resulting film is one of the best major rom-coms to come out of the UK in years feels like divine intervention. And the secret ingredient, coming as a surprise to literally everyone, is grief.
See, the opening 10 minutes of Mad About The Boy find poor Bridget lonelier than ever. Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy, tired of finding new reasons to break up with her between films, has gone and popped his clogs – leaving her to raise their two children all on her lonesome. It’s hardly a feel-good start, admittedly, but bear with it.
Because Firth’s more-or-less total absence is far more than a convenient plot device; it’s the film’s raison d’être. While previous outings struggled to move on without the original’s Pride & Prejudice structure to keep things tidy, Mad About The Boy becomes an unlikely study of a woman moving on from the death of a partner – one that may well have you in tears before the title appears on screen. Four years on from his death, Bridget’s grief isn’t the melodramatic, curl-into-a-ball-and-weep kind; instead, it’s settled into a kind of guilty melancholy, a piercing of self-esteem and a witlessness that’s impossible not to find moving.
But at the end of the day she’s still Bridget – which means she’s chronically late, quite sweary, and occasionally prone to setting things on fire. Zellweger is as perfect as ever in the title role, and she’s surrounded by a host of familiar faces. Rather than try to get them all back doing their old tricks, though, screenwriters Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan have captured the essence of what makes each character so beloved and simply thrust them – properly, this time – into middle age. Hugh Grant’s promiscuous scoundrel is now “Uncle Daniel” to the younger Joneses, all thoughts of romance between him and Bridget long fizzled out. Others have long settled into lives as not-so-smug “marrieds”. It feels powerfully authentic in exactly the way Bridget Jones’s Baby, for all its charms, didn’t.
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There are new faces, too, of course. Casper Knopf and Mila Jankovic are the two newest additions to the Jones/Darcy clan, and Leo Woodall is hilariously charming as Bridget’s much younger love interest. He’s given a lot more to do than his rival for her affections, which might explain how Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Mr Wallaker winds up feeling a bit more “Mr Darcy-lite” than a character in his own right.
But against all the odds, one wrong move on this tightrope still leaves Mad About The Boy soaring over the clouds. This is the best Bridget’s been since the original; the best London’s looked since Rye Lane; and the best rom-com of the year so far (yes, I know it’s only February). You’d be mad to miss it.
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is in UK cinemas 13th February
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