Directed by Michael Morris | Written by Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan | 124 min | ▲▲▲1/2 | Amazon Prime in Canada, Peacock in the US
It’s hard to believe a new Bridget Jones movie isn’t reaching cinemas here in Canada. It’s been a popular franchise that started way back in 2001, an adaptation of Helen Fielding’s novel that saw a sequel in 2004, Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, and a late arriving third film, Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2016. Now another one, nine years from the last.
Here’s the thing: The sequels up until now have been crap. Does anyone remember how clumsy but adorable singleton Bridget (the always winning Renee Zellweger) got stuck in a Thai prison in the second movie? That cultural portrait has aged like unrefrigerated milk, and it wasn’t that fresh even then.
The third movie arrived after a long break for Zellweger from the big screen — and we’d missed her. It wasn’t enough to paper over its fatal flaws.
This effort is a serious improvement. It’s not great by any stretch, but it’s the first — since the first — to reach for and even grasp something that carries real meaning. This one is episodic — sometimes to a fault — and occasionally strands its lead, but is also genuinely funny and even moving.
Bridget has given up the chic flat in Borough Market and is now living in a large, lovely home in Hampstead, close enough to walk to her two kids, Mabel (Mila Jankovic) and Billy (Casper Knopf), to their fancy grade school. Her long suffering love interest and then husband, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), has died while doing humanitarian work in Sudan. That’s right, in the last movie her other love interest, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), had died, and in this one he’s returned. Now Darcy is gone, leaving Bridget a widow.
This is not easy stuff to take seriously. At least the producers were smart enough to yeet Patrick Dempsey’s character after the third movie. They read the room: no need for one of those icky tech billionaires complicating matters.
However, Firth does cameo as a sad ghost haunting Bridget’s life while, four years after his passing, she tries to get back to it. That maybe means going back to work. It definitely means joining Tinder. Cue a morning dance party to David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” ignoring its already iconic use in Frances Ha.
The first half of this movie delivers on the kind of Bridget Jones we recognize — she’s unable to get much done without incurring huge embarrassment. Her much beloved best pals Shazzer, Jude, and Tom — Sally Phillips, Shirley Henderson, and James Callis — are back and given a little more to do this time out. Bridget’s parents (Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent) appear and vanish, while newer chums Miranda (Sarah Solemani) and Talitha (Josette Simon) get some good lines. Isla Fisher and Celia Imrie provide blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos.
New faces include a super-nanny (Nico Parker), and Bridget’s new Boy Toy, Roxter (Leo Woodall of White Lotus season two). His subplot is one of the best parts of the film, pushing Bridget out of her comfort zone and providing a bit of joy in her life, for awhile at least. A scene where the 20-something hunk rescues a dog in a pool is friggin’ triumphant.
But through this, Bridget is weirdly absent agency. She gets in over her head repeatedly, typically, but aside from her always-welcome talent with creative swears, the script doesn’t offer a lot of opportunity for her to show her smarts or her wit. She spends a lot of time scrunching up her nose, like when a child at her kids’ school asks why Mabel’s grandmother is wearing pyjamas. Everyone around her is more interesting and more colourful, with better lines.
Especially Emma Thompson. The return of Bridget’s gynecologist who reluctantly doubles as her primary care doctor is a total joy, as is Grant, who in three or four scenes scattered through the movie makes you wish it was called Daniel Cleaver’s Diary. 
All this while the extremely handsome Chiwetel Ejiofor hangs around as an uptight science teacher, Mr. Walliker, at Bridget’s kids’ school, patiently waiting for a third act field trip when the movie needs him to take off his shirt and be much more pleasant than he was at the start.
That’s also when Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy gets serious. We all know Zellweger can bring the drama, but this is the heaviest lifting she’s had to do in any of these movies, managing grief and parenthood, and it’s frankly a lot more welcome than her nose wrinkling. Bridget isn’t only missing Darcy, she’s missing the passing of her youth, and so is the audience that’s gotten older with her.
Would’ve been nice to do all that at the cinema.
