‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ Review: Renee Zellweger Disarms – Hollywood Reporter
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Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall join returning cast including Hugh Grant, Colin Firth and Emma Thompson in the fourth entry of the rom-com series based on Helen Fielding’s popular novels.
It’s been almost a quarter-century since Renée Zellweger first stepped into the shoes of the wine-guzzling, smoking, babbling, pratfall-prone and terminally awkward title character in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Over the course of four movies, the erstwhile singleton, forever sorting out complicated romantic entanglements and riddled with self-doubt, has become a virtual compendium of tics and mannerisms and cutesy eccentricities — not unlike an actress-character fusion of comparable vintage, Sarah Jessica Parker and Carrie Bradshaw. But the symbiosis between Zellweger and Bridget has an idiosyncratic charm that’s undeniable, which buoys this fourth chapter through patches of strained comedy and formulaic plotting.
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What really distinguishes Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, however, is the depth of feeling it brings to the protagonist’s grief and her gradual emergence from it. That goes double for Zellweger’s performance. In a franchise where happy endings are a contractual requirement, it can hardly be considered a spoiler to call the movie comfort-food therapy, showing how even the most devastating loss can make way for the unexpected joy and fulfillment of a reset.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
The Bottom Line
Uneven if ultimately disarming.
Release date: Thursday, Feb. 13Cast: Renée Zellweger, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Leo Woodall, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Jim Broadbent, Gemma Jones, Casper Knopf, Mila Jankovic, Sally Phillips, Shirley Henderson, James Callis, Sarah Solemani, Neil Pearson, Leila Farzad, Celia Imrie, Josette Simon, Nico ParkerDirector: Michael MorrisScreenwriters: Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer, Abi Morgan, based on the novel by Fielding
Rated R,
2 hours 4 minutes
Directed by Michael Morris, a television veteran who moved into features with the Andrea Riseborough vehicle To Leslie, Mad About the Boy is often sluggish and occasionally flat, lacking in rhythm in ways that the poppy needle drops can only do so much to disguise. But the inbuilt affection audiences have for the character will no doubt make the Universal release huge in the U.K. and a strong draw in the U.S. on Peacock, where it will stream exclusively. Fans will eat up the heady rush of emotional uplift in the tearjerking final act.
The screenplay by series author Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan lays its foundation in sorrow, jumping forward to several years after the events of the third installment, Bridget Jones’s Baby. After finally loosening up emotionally constipated Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) enough to marry him, Bridget is still struggling four years after he was killed while on a humanitarian mission in Sudan. Mark’s presence remains so vivid she still sees him.
Their adorable six-year-old daughter Mabel (Mila Jankovic) was too young to remember her father well, but she nonetheless asks every man she encounters if he’s going to be her new daddy, while her brother Billy (Casper Knopf), now 10, is a smart, somewhat withdrawn kid, touched by sadness.
In a funny throwback to the series’ roots, Bridget’s former boss and lover, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), previously presumed dead in a plane crash but now very much alive, is back as a dear friend, albeit still an outrageous flirt. The rakish womanizer has mellowed with age only insofar as he’s graduated from dating 20ish models to a 20ish poet, healer and model.
Grant, who scores many of the script’s best lines, brings a shot of mischievous vitality every time he’s onscreen, as well as some poignant commentary on mortality and lasting connection during a sobering juncture for Daniel. The actor’s career renaissance of the past decade has made him a value-added bonus to pretty much any project in which he appears. OK, maybe not as an Oompa-Loompa in the mystifyingly successful Wonka, but Heretic made up for it.
Having established an underlay of grief, the writers put aside the melancholy and return to the template, signaled by Bridget waking up and exuberantly lip-synching to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” while getting the kids ready for school.
As usual, everyone insists that what Bridget needs is to get laid. That includes her core friend group Shazzer (Sally Phillips), now a podcaster; Tom (James Callis), a life coach; and Jude (Shirley Henderson), a corporate high achiever who warns her, “If you don’t do i
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