Movie Review: Bridget Jones’s Baby

Bridget Jones is back and she’s brought some baby-daddy drama with her. So, is McDreamy or McDarcy the father?

A number of hot takes have emerged in the wake of America’s disastrous blockbuster season suggesting movies are dead. An overstatement? As a certain diary-keeper would say, v. v. v. much so.

But the hand-wringing isn’t unreasonable, especially with a third Bridget Jones film - 12 years after the abysmal Edge of Reason – acting as a potential harbinger of the cinematic apocalypse.

(Hugh Grant, sitting this threequel out, thought the script by author Helen Fielding and Dan Mazer was beneath him. No wonder cineastes have begun squirrelling away canned foods, seeking refuge underground.)

Expectations, following the dreadful second instalment of the Bridget Jones saga, are understandably low. Helpfully, that should mean many will leave Bridget Jones’s Baby mildly charmed, if not entirely delighted, by its innocuousness. There’s nowhere to go but up.

Renée Zellweger returns, following a too-long absence from film, as Bridget, a now 43-year-old news producer living in London. She’s unable to fit in with the youthful hipsters at work, or her child-rearing friends, so singledom is even lonelier than when she used to sing along to “All By Myself” in her pyjamas.

It doesn’t help that dating has changed significantly since last we saw her, what with the advent of Facebook and Tinder. And yet, Ms. Jones’ only embrace of the modern world is the iPad she uses to document her daily dilemmas. As we see, her last fling occurred at the most 'early-2000s' of hook-up spots: a muddy music festival. There, to get back in the game, she spends one night in a yurt with American tech-guru Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey).

Not long after that encounter, Bridget is reunited with her imperfectly-perfect ex Mark Darcy (Colin Firth); recently divorced and ready to passively complicate Bridget’s life with perfectly coiffed hair once again. They fall into bed – at the only place less romantic than a music fest: a child’s baptism – and several weeks later Bridget discovers she’s up the duff. Trouble is, her gynaecologist (Emma Thompson, also responsible for polishing the script Grant felt wasn’t up to snuff) can’t divine which of the two gents is indeed the father of her incoming baby. Much awkwardness ensues.

Sharon Maguire, director of the excellent Bridget Jones’s Diary, similarly reappears after a hiatus here. (She was not responsible for Edge of Reason.) Though Maguire can’t be accused of making this third feature breezier than her first effort (it’s 26 minutes longer), she recaptures the original’s easy charm.

Much of the credit must go to Zellweger, always comfortable on screen in her Bridget Jones guise, and Firth, still endearingly smitten with - and befuddled by - his co-star.

Dempsey, notably not Hugh Grant, is deployed as the inoffensive rival to Firth’s comparatively bad-boy barrister. Needless to say, Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t build up to as satisfying a climax as the first picture’s slap-fight, but watching Darcy and Qwant out-nice one another as they rush a bursting Bridget to the hospital is amusing enough.

Though Bridget’s mostly triumphant return will be a relief to fans, there remains much to be suspicious of in this third excursion; the absence of Grant, and the utter rejection of our heroine’s professional achievements and aspirations in place of a husband and baby, specifically.

Then again, the laughs flow somewhat dependably and there’s a genuine uniqueness to a well-meaning rom-com centered on fortysomethings (and fiftysomethings).

If cinema has to die, we may as well kill it with kindness.

3/5

In cinemas September 15. Rated M for sexual references and coarse language.