Bridget Jones’s Baby is the third outing for our heroine as played by Renée Zellweger, whose cosmetic work to face has received more media attention than the film itself, but we will try to counteract that here. So, on this occasion, Bridget finds herself pregnant but does not know if the father is our old friend, uptight lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth, who is not as young and dewy as he was at, say, 32, perhaps because he’s now 56), or the American dating magnate Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey, 50, who may have let himself go a bit, but then he has had three children, so fair’s fair). And now a note to self: stop going on about how Hollywood women are damned if they do and damned if they won’t (get older, that is) and just tell us if this is worth seeing. Answer to self: OK! I’ll try!
It’s directed by Sharon Maguire, who helmed the first Bridget Jones film, which was excellent, but not the second, which veered off tediously into that silly Thai jail business. It’s written by Helen Fielding, who invented Bridget as a column in the Independent (RIP), and also Dan Mazer (Sacha Baron Cohen’s collaborator, looking not too bad for 44), and Emma Thompson who, being a cheeky blighter, has written in a part for herself which may even be the best part.
The opening nicely takes us back to film one, square one, with poor old Bridge sitting in her PJs decorated with those little penguins — where does she get such long-lasting PJs from? Not Primark, I would venture — in that top-floor flat although instead of lip-syncing ‘All By Myself’, she bounces about to House of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’.
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