A flawless accent, funny script
and some filthy humour

By Laura Tennant, The Independent

WILL RENEE ZELLWEGER ever live down Bridget Jones? She may have shrunk back to a standard Hollywood size 6, but for a moment there she was just like me and 1,000 others - flushed, tired and emotional, spilling out of her little black number (provenance: High Street), frequently falling over and a very respectable size 12. It was a triumph of method acting, and we loved her for it. So, too, did her leading men, in a female fantasy in which Hugh Grant, looking devilishly handsome, turns down an American hardbody for Bridget's somewhat cuddlier charms. 

Based, of course, on Helen Fielding's cult novel, the movie traces the romantic misadventures of book publicist Bridget. Will she be persuaded by the caddish and unreliable Grant, playing her boss, Daniel Cleaver, or will Colin Firth, as the austere barrister Mark Darcy, win the day? 

Firth might as well have "good husband material" tattooed across his forehead, but despite this, or perhaps because of it, he makes a devastatingly sexy Darcy. And ladies, I mean devastating.

The competition for Bridget between Firth and Grant may be the stuff of fantasy but Bridget's unerring ability to choose the wrong man is the reality check with which every woman in the audience can identify. And that's what makes this film something you'll want to add to your home video collection next to Four Weddings and a Funeral. 

Fielding herself was criticised for not "empowering" Bridget; why, some literalists asked, does she have to be quite so hopeless? Because she is the scapegoat by which all our sins of low self- esteem and secretly fancying bastards can be atoned. 

Cynics might suggest that this movie is pitched at an American audience, hence the casting of Zellweger (and the final scenes in an unlikely snowbound, Dickensian London). But the director, Sharon Maguire (on whom Fielding based Bridget's best friend Shazzer), and the writers, Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis, have done nothing to dilute the uniquely filthy and British quality of the humour and the book, or the professional standards of drinking, smoking and swearing maintained by Shazzer, Jude and Tom. 

Zellweger's accent is pretty much flawless and the script is extremely funny and often deeply rude (I wonder, for instance, how the lighthearted anal-sex banter between Bridget and Daniel will play in Salt Lake City?)

The wonderful Jim Broadbent gives a subtle, unsentimental and strangely moving performance as Bridget's dad while Gemma Jones is suitably infuriating as her mother. 

At the screening I attended, the audience began laughing around the first frame and didn't really stop. I loved it.