Renée Zellweger in BRIDGET JONES'S BABY. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Courtney Howard // Film Critic
It’s been twelve years since BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON and our loveable literary heroine has gotten into some rather sticky situations since then. In BRIDGET JONES’S BABY, which bears only a faint resemblance to the Helen Fielding’s novel (Mad About The Boy) that caused an uproar, Bridget has to choose between two men after she finds out she’s got a bun in the oven. V. bad, Bridget.
Here’s the official synopsis:
After breaking up with Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), Bridget Jones’s (Renée Zellweger) “happily ever after” hasn’t quite gone according to plan. Fortysomething and single again, she decides to focus on her job as top news producer and surround herself with old friends and new. For once, Bridget has everything completely under control. What could possibly go wrong?
Then her love life takes a turn and Bridget meets a dashing American named Jack (Patrick Dempsey), the suitor who is everything Mr. Darcy is not. In an unlikely twist she finds herself pregnant, but with one hitch…she can only be fifty percent sure of the identity of her baby’s father.
Though the original was a smash hit and captured the hearts of many (myself included), BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON didn’t hold a candle to its predecessor, taking in only $40 mil – which incidentally was its budget. Since there’s been such a long gap between features and the film no longer having the controversy the book had to get tongues wagging, I’m not so sure audiences will renew their love for Miss Jones.
I mean, killing Mark Darcy on screen, as Fielding does in her novel, would be a cinematic crime akin to killing a dog – or maybe it wouldn’t because Mark is the Gwen Stacey to Bridget’s Spider-man. We’ll never know because that’s not clearly not the avenue the filmmakers took with Bridget’s cinematic travails.
BRIDGET JONES’S BABY opens on September 16.
