Since Bridget Jones made her big-screen debut in 2001, newspaper think pieces have looked to Helen Fielding’s creation as a gauge of the condition of contemporary women — a metric of anxieties about social pressures, body image, the difficulty of choosing suitable partners or the right size knickers. A quarter of a century on, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy turns its attention to issues of child-raising, bereavement and pulling hot younger men.
Here, Bridget (Renée Zellweger) has recently lost her husband Mark (a briefly glimpsed Colin Firth), killed in Darfur. Raising her son and daughter alone, Bridget is worn down by her friends’ well-meaning but contradictory advice. Eventually, though, she moves on — and into the arms of hunky young parkkeeper/biochemist Roxster (Leo Woodall). As with Nicole Kidman in Babygirl and Anne Hathaway in The Idea of You, younger men are the match of the moment, provided they’re intelligent, super-presentable and — in this case — able to impress their date’s chums with tricks like the show-stopping rescue of a small dog. Meanwhile, don’t discount schoolteacher Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), stern, over-disciplined but under whose unchic jacket may beat a tender heart.
This fourth movie in the series is predictably smug, taking place in a hermetically sealed, dirt-free Hampstead of the soul. But it offers the odd snappy line, such as Bridget’s response when Roxster makes a polite advance: “Ah, the generation that asks.”
There are nice sober performances from Ejiofor and Emma Thompson. Best of all is Hugh Grant (who by now must have “value for money” inscribed in Latin on his coat of arms) as Bridget’s old beau, Daniel, now an avuncular, rather sad roué. Zellweger, though, is distractingly mannered and given to bizarre facial contortions, as though Bridget is these days taking her Chardonnay with a ketamine chaser.
★★☆☆☆
In UK cinemas from February 14