Bridget
Jones’s Baby, Odeon Leicester Square
Kate Muir | The Times –
September 6, 2016
★★★★☆
“I need a good shafting!”
shouts Bridget Jones as she totters into a rock festival in high heels and
white jeans, and lo and behold her dream comes true in a yurt. Indeed, at
43, Bridget’s barren and lonely life is about to change. While she sadly
declares herself a Spilf – a spinster I’d like to f*** – it’s not
long in Bridget Jones’s Baby before
she gets pregnant and attains the coveted status of a Milf.
Yes, Bridget (Renée Zellweger), London’s most famous
chardonnay-slugging, insecure singleton, is back after a 12-year hiatus,
in an affectionate and hilarious film. As usual she is torn between two
lovers, feeling like a fool. Colin Firth is back as Mark Darcy, the
uptight, upper-class lawyer who is going through a divorce from his wife,
Camilla, and a new character appears in the enticing form of Patrick
Dempsey as Jack Qwant, an American dating website millionaire. Both men
are sucked into Bridget’s vortex of chaos, and either could be the
father of her child.
Sadly Hugh Grant decided not to join the third film, after starring as
Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and The Edge of Reason (2004), but his disappearance allows the
mickey to be thoroughly taken.
I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but true fans of Helen
Fielding’s novels should just stop reading now and buy tickets for a
girls’ night out to the cinema. To replicate these conditions, I went to
the screening with my friend Deb, armed with miniature bottles of plonk
and paper cups in our handbags. We laughed all the way through.
Our favourite lines were delivered by Emma Thompson, a co-writer on the
film, who plays the obstetrician. She advises Jack and Mark to avoid
looking at the technical end in the birthing room, since her husband
described watching their baby’s arrival as “like watching your
favourite pub burn down”.
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