Two decades have gone by since the original bestseller that spawned two films, the 2001 romcom hit 'Bridget Jones’s Diary' and its distinctively inferior and poorly received 2004 sequel 'Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason' was released. And the passage of time has obviously not been kind to its lead stars Hugh Grant, Colin Firth and Renee Zellweger. So a dip into a brand that was well forgotten might not have been a great idea to start with. Especially since Hugh Grant categorically refused to have anything to do with it. But the studio heads were unfazed and had a neat way to circumvent that deficit.
In this third edition of the Bridget Jones series, Bridget is celebrating her 43rd birthday and is still single. Her one love Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) has moved on and married someone else while the other,Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) shows up as a corpse in a funeral that is attended by a bevy of hotshot young models and a few older friends and family. That memory was shown in a flashback while Bridget was reminiscing in her diary about her birthday celebrations that did not go as well as she hoped for. Just as Bridget had decided to concentrate on her career as a top news producer her love life comes back from the dead. She meets a dashing millionaire Jack (Patrick Dempsey) and has a fling with him and she also gets into the sack with her former lover Mark, while he is in the throes of a divorce. The result is a surprise pregnancy that leaves Bridget clueless about who the real father is. The contretemps here is mostly about how Bridget tries to find the identity of the real father while moving steadily towards a happily ever after.
Hopefully, this will be the end of a series that hasn’t had as much success as the studio hoped for. This one though has enough smarts, tongue-in-cheek wit and reminiscent charm to keep the audience tittering in their seats.
The story of a middle aged woman and her attempts to cure the loneliness of singledom may be nothing new but it echoes back to the earlier Bridget Jones editions and delivers a progression in time that is quite befitting. Of course the demographic of the viewer that this film is targeted at has also shifted. The inclusion of Patrick Dempsey as Jack brings it a fresh infusion of testosterone and the caddish Daniel Cleaver is not missed as sorely as was expected.
The continuity is sloppy in places and the editing is not as sharp as was needed. The direction though is pretty much comedy enriching. The lead actors do a good job but it’s really Emma Thompson as the Gynaec who is handling Bridget’s pregnancy, who mixes it up and raises the game to a few laughs more. This exercise may not be as fresh and robustly energizing as the first salvo but it’s certainly better than the previous one.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.