Even with Leo Woodall and Chiwetel Ejiofor onboard and taking off their shirts, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy proves a sequel too far
“It’s more like 30 years to be honest”
Returning to Helen Fielding’s novels after Bridget Jones’s Baby turned to her columns, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is an adaptation of her third book in the series, with a screenplay by Fielding, Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan and directed by a man – Michael Morris – for the first time in this franchise. For all its attempts to bring new blood into the Bridget-verse though, the film carries the weight of that franchise a little too heavily, feeling the need to squeeze in three films’ worth of previous supporting characters alongside everything else.
Now in her early 50s and a single mother to two pre-teen children. Bridget is also now [spoiler alert] an unreasonably wealthy widow with a grand pad in Hampstead and no apparent need to work, consequently she’s lost a little of the essential relatability that made her such an endearing and enduring character. We join her four years after Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy got blown up by a mine in Sudan, sufficient time for her friends to warn her that her vagina will seal itself up if she doesn’t get laid – James Callis, Shirley Henderson and Sally Phillips all returning in the thankless and underwritten roles of Bridget’s wayward besties.
As we’re in prime romcom territory and heaven forfend that she manage to establish a life without a man, Bridget joins Tinder and soon gets hit up by the much younger abs of Leo Woodall’s green-fingered Roxster. A heady summer of shagging follows as she enjoys the attention from having a toyboy, whilst also low-key flirting with a stern teacher from her kids’ prep school, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Mr Wallaker. But where Bridget Jones’s Baby took a meaningful look at how impending unexpected parenthood affected its three leads, there’s no exploratory depth to age-gap relationships here, no matter how seriously we’re ultimately meant to take it.
Matters aren’t helped by a strangely pitched performance from Renée Zellweger which can’t be explained away by the disorientating effects of grief. Whether through the direction or her mannerisms, there’s something almost otherworldly in its strangeness, resulting in an abject lack of chemistry with pretty much everyone from her kids, her pals or either shirtless man she’s ogling. At the same time, so few of the supporting characters are given anything to work with – so many of the familiar faces reappear but some of them literally for just seconds, Gemma Jones and particularly Jim Broadbent are hard done by as Bridget’s parents.
It all means that the deep melancholy that suffuses so much of the film doesn’t resonate in the way that it should, that journey of navigating grief through all the different continuing relationships in your life undermined by oversentimentality rather than the bracing honesty one might have expected. Hugh Grant’s Daniel Cleaver remains a high spot, sparingly used here but so much more effective in showing the effect of the passing decades on unreconstructed characters. Not quite the Valentine’s gift we were hoping for.
