Pants or not: Bridget Jones
She’s still an adorable disaster and Darcy’s a deadpan delight. But there’s no Hugh Grant – and the comedy’s patchy. Is it time to hang up the big pants?
Bridget Jones has not graced the big screen for 12 years but the good news is that while she’s been away she seems to have got her mojo back. She’s lost the lingering puppy-fat that was the curse of her early 30s, glossed up her hair and, at the age of 43, can still turn heads on London Bridge. There is, as she herself puts it, ‘life in the old dog yet’.
And thanks to the remarkable comic talent that is Renée Zellweger, she’s right. Zellweger slips back into the character so convincingly that it’s like meeting an old friend. Sure, our intrepid television news producer may look a little older and, indeed, a little sleeker, but she’s unmistakably the wonderful, accident-prone Bridget we’ve always known. Which, of course, means she’s still having man trouble.
‘Of the two great loves of my life, one is married and the other…’ No, tempting as it is, I’m not going to spoil the clever story device that provides an early comic highlight, explains Hugh Grant’s absence as the wicked Daniel Cleaver and sets comedy expectations soaring.
Expectations that, it turns out, are never quite met. For while the vanity-free Zellweger is genuinely terrific, and the film certainly delivers a handful of laugh-out-loud moments, it never quite catches comic fire. As Bridget might say, if she were keeping score in the same way she used to with calories and alcoholic units: ‘Laughs? Not quite enough.’
So where does it go wrong? It’s difficult to say, but the twinkly eyed Patrick Dempsey, who plays one of the two men who might be the father of Bridget’s soon-to-be-born baby, is nowhere near as funny as Grant. Gags about Glastonbury mud and Gangnam Style dance routines feel dated, and there’s something about the pregnancy storyline itself that never really got me chuckling.
Yes, of course, I can see the comic potential in a plot that involves two men, two nights of passion and some vegan condoms well past their use-by date but, for me, that potential is never quite realised, partly because of the lies Bridget then finds herself telling to both men (inadvertently, she would no doubt say) and partly because of what ensues. Because, stretching credibility to the limit, both men – Jack (Dempsey), the American internet dating billionaire she
hooks up with at Glastonbury, and the love of her life, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), stick around to support her through her pregnancy. Being men, each is convinced the baby is his.
Having this unlikely trio attend an ante-natal class only to be mistaken for a gay couple and their surrogate is very funny but, elsewhere, large chunks of this awkward storyline left me not so much unamused as under-amused.
Nevertheless, Firth, now 56 and notably slender, remains a deadpan delight as Darcy, the strait-laced human-rights lawyer who surely knows he can’t escape his destiny – to be hopelessly in love with the almost entirely unsuitable Bridget – for ever. There are also nice supporting turns from returning regulars Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent as Bridget’s parents, Neil Pearson as her soon-to-be-replaced boss, and from franchise newcomer Sarah Solemani, who plays Miranda, her dirty-talking newscaster colleague. For Bridget aficionados, it’s going to be unmissable, the film that belatedly completes (surely) the trilogy. But for others… well, despite the return of original director Sharon Maguire and a screenplay by Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer and Emma Thompson – who also does a scene-stealing turn as Bridget’s splendidly pragmatic obstetrician – the end result is only fractionally better than the flawed and floundering Edge Of Reason, and not a patch on the magnificent 2001 original movie.