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”.