Zellweger delivers in fun romp heavy with expectation  

Peter Bradshaw | The Guardian – September 6, 2016


Sell-by dates don’t mean anything... do they?” Bridget Jones is talking about the eco-friendly biodegradable condoms she bought ages ago, and with which she has suddenly ended an aeon-long sex famine by using twice, on getting suddenly lucky with two chaps within a few days: dishy online dating expert (Patrick Dempsey) and her old smoulderer, the unexpectedly single Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Now 40-something Bridget has ascended the duff and there is a Mamma-Mia!-style mystery about the dad’s identity. The director is Sharon Maguire, and the writers are Emma Thompson, Dan Mazer and Helen Fielding, author of the original newspaper column and bestselling book.

As for Bridget’s own sell-by date, well, she now joins the conga-line of figures from the late 90s and early noughties making their sheepish comeback: David Brent, AbFab, Cold Feet. But Renée Zellweger’s own return after 12 years in the dithery role she created – and after a six-year absence from the screen – has been overshadowed by a massive media overreaction to cosmetic work which she has evidently had done.

It was an overreaction based on misleading still publicity shots and common-or-garden weight loss – this is a sleeker Bridget – and naturally coloured by the traditional ungallant and misogynist need to punish female stars for their looks. In this movie, Bridget’s familiar crinkly-eyed smile has been replaced by a clearer and more direct gaze. But so what? In some scenes in this film, and from some angles, Zellweger looks to me pretty much the same. At other moments, it’s as if she’s regenerated, like Dr Who. But her Bridget is still the same old klutz: unsure whether to embrace her new sexual destiny of cougardom or being an attractive spinster or Spilf.

This is a better Bridget than the last movie, The Edge of Reason, because it doesn’t feel the need to indulge shark-jumping setpieces like zipping off to Thailand. We stick in her old London manor of Borough and she’s still in the same old scuzzy flat, still working for a cable TV news company, where she has now improbably become a producer.

This is pretty broad comedy we’re talking about: not Mrs Brown’s Boys-broad, but broad nevertheless. Yet the effect is achieved in the same way as the first movie. Basically, Bridget presides over a kind of coalition government of very good supporting turns which on aggregate enforce their chaotic comic rule over the audience. Just about.

Sadly, Hugh Grant’s über-cad Daniel Cleaver is no longer with us, but Colin Firth’s uptight Darcy is still a droll turn – he seems to be channelling his royal hauteur as George VI even more than ever, still super handsome and distinguished, but his head and neck slightly etiolated, like a very posh tortoise. There is a nice scene when Darcy and Bridget find themselves having to pose uncomfortably with a baby to which they are now godparents. “Perhaps a kiss on the head, sir...?” says the wheedling photographer, “... mm ... I actually meant the baby.”

Then there is Emma Thompson, who has cheekily written herself a part as Bridget’s droll doctor – an evolved progression, perhaps, from the drily knowing nurse she played opposite Jeff Goldblum in Richard Curtis’s The Tall Guy.

One distinct breakout performance is Sarah Solemani (who played a prim teacher in Jack Whitehall’s TV sitcom Bad Education) and is now the archly sexy presenter Miranda on Bridget’s show and who takes her to a music festival in a (successful) attempt to get her laid. Bridget is unconvinced that “glamping” is any better than camping just because you’ve added a g and an l: “Gladolf Hitler would be no better.” Solemani has a nice moment when she briefly but horribly bangs her hip on the TV stage set as she walks across it and has to keep talking.

Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent are amiably back as Bridget’s mum and dad, Jones completely unsure how FaceTime works on her smartphone and standing for the parish council for the Conservative Party. She is horrified by the double-daddy dilemma. “You mean it was a three-way, darling?” Sally Phillips, Shirley Henderson and James Callis are themselves brought back as Bridge’s friend-chorus of baffled dismay and qualified approval.

What sealed the deal for me – by a whisker – was the gigantic physical comedy that Dempsey, Zellweger and Firth uncorked as they try to get through the hospital revolving door as Bridget is about to give birth, the traditional romcom rush to the airport having been re-invented for this maternal drama. This is the best way to end what can only can be described as the Bridget Jones franchise: something resembling a likeable, good-natured one-off TV holiday special.