Bridget Jones’s Baby *** (2016, Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Gemma Jones, Jim Broadbent, Emma Thompson) – Movie Review

Bridget Jones’s Baby are three words to strike terror in some movie goers, but this old-fashioned romp is surprisingly amusing, likeable and genial, a few casual stereotypes and bad attitudes apart. Really, it is not at all good about gay people, Asians and Italians, and its media satire is broad at best. Yet, overall, it is still quite funny and even charming.

A lot of this must be down to the long-honed thespian skills of its three stars – Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, and Patrick Dempsey. As the film has done well in cinemas, earning $41 million in the UK in three weeks at number one, I hope they are on a share of the profits. They deserve it. Without them, it would be very little indeed. The screenplay by Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer and Emma Thompson isn’t bad – it’s a solid sitcom script – but they make mini silk purses when it turns into a sow’s ear from time to team.

Firth gives one of his most low-key, mumblingly nervous performances ever, though of course this is a stock in trade for him, and it eventually comes off nicely. Dempsey is so sweet and charming it hurts. He’s got it just right. And, apart from, maybe, her weirdly clipped, over-studied English accent, Zellweger just is Bridget Jones, the older but no-wiser Bridget Jones, but the same old Bridget Jones. After a film career gap, Zellweger deserves this new chance. It’s a big credit to het that she makes quite an irritating character human, ‘real’ and appealing.

Still a singleton, Bridget Jones celebrates her 43rd birthday by bonking with sweet, charming and handsome American billionaire Jack (Dempsey), then a week later re-encounters her Mr [Mark] Darcy (Firth), so they promptly bonk too. These are strictly one-night stands, matters of instant regret to Bridget, but there are consequences. She’s pregnant! The smart-talking doctor (Emma Thompson, funny) can’t help her with who the father is. So she gets Dempsey on the TV show she produces, so the interviewer Miranda (Sarah Solemani, amusing) can grill him about fatherhood. And then she tackles Firth.

The rest of the story and screenplay write themselves on the way to the inevitable ending. It is a romcom, and predictable endings are de rigueur, though the questions of who’s the daddy and who Bridget will end up with are strung out for a very long time, in a long movie, and surprisingly quite successfully too. I’m not saying it could have been shorter. It could. But it is sharply edited (though not always cleanly edited) and well paced and dynamic, with no flat, comedy dead zone areas. Ideas for laughs are chucked at the screen throughout and most of them stick. Some are really silly, but the entirely middle-aged and senior audience round me was mostly laughing most of the time.

Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent do their very best to make Bridget’s parents come alive, though the marvellous Jones is fighting playing an obnoxious character, a Tory stereotype, and Broadbent’s role is small and low key to the point of hardly being there. At least over-acting isn’t a choice for Broadbent here. Because the film is better than expected, I’ll refrain from a short list of actors giving untruthful, over-acting performances in the movie. But they know who they are.

Sharon Maguire, director of the original Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) returns to the helm and makes it slick and smooth. Her only other movie is the forgotten Incendiary in 2008. Beeban Kidron directed the sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004).

It is all quite saucy, with a UK 15 and American R for strong language, smutty sex references and some nudity. A 12 would probably have done quite nicely though. I was fearful we would have a movie about nappies and pooping, but it’s not that kind of film at all. Maybe the clips from the old Bridget Jones films are a mistake, because it makes you remember what the principals looked like back then, and how long ago it all is, and how much water has flowed under so many bridges.

By the way, they saved the best gag till the very end – very funny. Bridget Jones 4, possibly called Bridget Jones’s Divorce, must be just round the corner.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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