Bridget: a beauty

by Christopher Tookey, Daily Mail

Bridget Jones is back, and she's fatter, funnier and more foolish than ever. Three years on, she's become a globetrotting James Bond of romantic misadventure. 

It's been a fine year for sequels, and Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason - like Shrek 2 and Spider Man 2 - is even better than the original. I confidently predict it will be the biggest British hit of all time - an outstanding romantic comedy, with no fewer than three performances that deserve to be regarded as classics. 

Renee Zellweger is, quite simply, adorable. She has created in Bridget a truly wonderful comic creation: someone who, for better or worse, epitomises an entire generation. 

I saw the film with an audience of whom 80 per cent were females in their 20s and 30s, and never have I felt such a wave of love and empathy from an audience towards a single character. 

From the moment she sings a dopey version of The Sound Of Music on top of Primrose Hill, she has us in the palm of her chubby hand. 

Sexy Mark Darcy 

And as her self-destructive insecurities, awful dress sense and breathtaking lack of social skills threaten her perfect, four-week-old relationship with her 'human rights lawyer and total sex god' Mark Darcy, she offers an even more highly credible view than Shrek 2 of what can go wrong with a relationship after the partners have walked off into the sunset. 

Zellweger received an Oscar nomination as Best Actress for her last performance as Bridget. Here, she's even better. 

Her English accent is more consistently accurate, and her use of embarrassed British body language in the kind of costumes that would make Trinny and Susannah reach for the smelling salts is consistently hilarious. 

Hugh Grant is superb 

She reveals an unexpected talent for slapstick that recalls the heyday of Lucille Ball. 

Hugh Grant is equally superb as the clever, charismatic, eternally unreliable love rat Daniel Cleaver, who claims to have been in therapy for sex addiction ("I hug people who smell") but remains randy enough to mount a telling counter-attack on Bridget's wobbly virtue in, appropriately enough, Bangkok and Phuket. 

Other things happen to Daniel, too, that suggest Grant has an ability unique among movie stars to laugh at himself and his own offscreen frailties. 

It's hard luck on Jude Law's Alfie that he should have to do battle at the box office with a mere supporting character who's so much sexier and more topical than he is. 

Colin Firth once again survives having to wear the comedy pullover that Gyles Brandreth rejected, and has much more to do, in terms of acting range, than in the first movie; he pulls it off with extraordinary confidence and power. 

He has matured as a serious actor, while maintaining the lightness of touch you need in a romantic comedy. 

His improvised, fight with Hugh Grant over Bridget outside the Serpentine art gallery is even more tear-inducingly uproarious and undignified than in the first movie. 

Firth and Grant go head-to-head 

In Firth, Grant and Paul Bettany (who stood head and shoulders above the mediocrity of the film Wimbledon), Britain has the world's three best rom-com actors. 

Of course the film will have its critics who will accuse it of being comfy, unrealistic and inhabiting the middle-class universe of Notting Hill and Love Actually. And yes, it is in the same tradition. 

It's highly stylised: neon signs in Piccadilly Circus blare out encouragement to Bridget as she totters past, and her answering machine has a spitefulness all its own: "You have absolutely NO messages. Not a single one. Not even from your mother!" 

Like several of the plot strands in Love Actually, Bridget Jones 2 is humorously ironic and postmodern, in the way it deliberately sends itself up as unrealistic. At one point, Bridget begs Darcy to propose to her with the words: "I know there's no music playing and it's not snowing, but ..." 

And, sure enough, later on we do get the obligatory music and Richard Curtis-y snow scene, though not in quite the romantic context we expected. 

So, in some ways, BJ2 is deliberately artificial and aware of its lack of realism as a feel-good movie. But it's also highly authentic in the way it portrays how modern singles really think; and its sympathetic portrayal of middle-class life is much more recognisable than films which seek to rub our noses in the awfulness of everything, and the repulsiveness above all else of being English, white and middle-class. 

If this is bourgeois cinema, give us more of it - especially when it's as funny, charming, sophisticated and gloriously successful as this is.