Screendaily Review

By Geoffrey Macnab

Bridget Jones is back, as fretful and neurotic as ever, in an expertly crafted (if rather soulless) sequel which is likely to hit all the right buttons for Working Title. Renee Zelwegger again excels as the podgy, thirtysomething London singleton with the ineffably messy love life. She is fed plenty of witty and acerbic one-liners by a high- powered screenwriting team. Hugh Grant effectively reprises his role as the womanising cad, Daniel Cleaver, while Colin Firth looks as tousled and soulful as ever playing handsome but uptight lawyer, Darcy, the love of Bridget’s life. Nonetheless, it occasionally seems as if we’re watching a remake, not a sequel. The same characters perform the same arabesques as in Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), albeit in different order. The other key novelty here is that there is some foreign travel thrown in.

In her first cinema outing, Bridget reaped a weighty $280m at the worldwide box-office. Novelist Helen Fielding’s heroine seems certain to post equally fat returns with her second foray on the big screen. She should certainly help Working Title to exorcise the memories of a very skinny summer in which Thunderbirds nose-dived and Wimbledon double-faulted with US audiences.

Some reviews will be grudging, some male viewers might find Bridget’s antics on the emetic side, US viewers may be baffled by references to popular UK TV shows like Footballers’ Wives, but that shouldn’t affect what should be bumper business both sides of the Atlantic.

As the film begins, Bridget is in clover. "I’ve found my happy ending at last," she confides in her diary-style voice-over which runs throughout the movie. She has spent several weeks as the girlfriend of Darcy. He seemingly loves everything about her, even her "wobbly bits." But she has simmering doubts about the relationship. These are exacerbated during a skiing holiday during which she thinks she has fallen pregnant. She makes a fool of herself at Darcy’s law society dinner and remains suspicious that he is having an affair with the leggy and glamorous Rebecca Gillies. The relationship splutters to a halt and Bridget (still trying to make her mark as a serious TV journalist) is whisked off to Thailand by her bosses to present a travel show. Her co-host is the seemingly reformed Cleaver, who claims to have been in sex therapy. After narrowly avoiding being seduced by him, she ends up in a Thai jail, accused of drug smuggling.

The narrative moves forward in episodic fashion. Rather than a seamless piece of storytelling, this is essentially a collection of comic set-pieces. Some work, some don’t. In one memorable scene, we see Bridget communing with the sand on a magic mushroom trip. In another, she takes to the slopes, inadvertently wins a slalom race, and ends up skiing into a pharmacy where the German-speaking locals are baffled by her requests for a pregnancy testing kit. The sequence in the Thai prison, in which she choreographs the other inmates in a performance of Madonna’s Like A Virgin, is excruciating, but whenever the film lurches too far toward whimsy or mawkishness, the filmmakers will throw in a piece or sardonic dialogue or a joke about Bridget’s oversized underwear.

Paradoxically, Bridget is a prim and surprisingly naive figure. Though she talks endlessly about "shagging," she doesn’t do very much of it. Zellwegger seems to have put even more weight on to play the part than for the first film. The risk was that if she made Bridget too blowzy, it would be mystifying why Darcy and Cleaver were so obsessed by her, but that if she was too demure, she would turn into a wallflower. It’s a tribute to Zellwegger’s virtuoso performance that Bridget still remains a credible romantic heroine, however absurd and embarrassing the circumstances in which she finds herself.

As per usual in Working Title’s romantic comedies, we’re treated to various picture postcard views of London landmarks in breaks between the drama. There is one bravura shot in which the camera pulls back from solitary, self-pitying Bridget and pans across a huge, night-time cityscape full of happy lovers, but such formal flourishes are kept to a minimum.

What now for Bridget Jones? Early on, as we see Bridget sky diving to the accompaniment of Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better before plummeting down to earth in a pool of pig shit, the filmmakers pay their own tongue-in-cheek hommage to James Bond. It’s doubtful whether Bridget will have the staying power of Ian Fleming’s spy hero. There are no new Helen Fielding novels for Working Title to draw on and it’s hard to see how Bridget could yet again be restored to her blissfully unhappy singleton state, but if the box-office warrants it, don’t be surprised if Bevan and Fellner try to turn Jones into a Bond-style franchise with a second sequel.