‘Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy’ review: big heart and belly laughs from a ’90s icon

Is Bridget Jones a ’90s relic? Probably, but she’s a ’90s relic with a curious hold on the collective imagination. The character’s creator Helen Fielding recently said that “half the audience” at her book signings are Gen Z, a surprising development given that Bridget’s chaotic dating life defined an era before body positivity, swiping right and busting the gender binary. Then again, maybe Fielding’s writing was more prescient than it seemed. She’s rumoured to have based Mark Darcy, the more dependable of Bridget’s two love interests, on the man who is now Prime Minister.

Fielding’s scatty protagonist remains incredibly watchable in this fourth Bridget Jones film, which revives the franchise after nine years. It’s hardly a spoiler to mention that Colin Firth‘s Mark Darcy is now dead, because Fielding offed him in the 2013 novel this movie is based on – sorry, Keir.

So, Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is now a widowed mother-of-two living in a picture-perfect house on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Unrealistic? No more so than the sleek flat in Borough Market she rented in her early thirties. These films have always unfolded in a Richard Curtis-style fantasy London where it always snows at Christmas and no one ever has to worry about paying the rent. When Bridget decides to return to her old job as a TV producer, it’s blithely assumed that she’ll hire a nanny, which of course she does.

Bridget is now platonically close to her other great love, Hugh Grant‘s incorrigible Daniel Cleaver, who’s more lech than lothario these days and is still dating younger women. The screenplay by Fielding, Abi Morgan (Shame) and Dan Mazer (Borat) makes some trite points about the way middle-aged women are written off, before swiftly supplying Bridget with two handsome suitors. First she’s pursued by Roxster, a twentysomething park ranger played by an impeccably cast Leo Woodall. In one of the film’s many self-referential moments, Roxster takes Bridget to Borough Market, then asks her: “Do you know this area?” But she also feels a frisson with Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a brusque teacher at her kids’ school who’s beginning to show a softer side.

Director Michael Morris, who previously made the indie addiction drama To Leslie, doesn’t quite manage to smooth out this film’s clunky structure. It sometimes feels like two romcoms spliced together, each populated with enough familiar characters to fill a limited series. Jim Broadbent has an affecting cameo as Bridget’s doting dad; Emma Thompson gets the best lines as her sardonic gynaecologist. But despite these flaws, Mad About the Boy delivers the two things a lot of people really want from a Bridget Jones movie: belly laughs and emotional moments. Crucially, even with a passing reference to ‘Brat Summer‘, neither Bridget nor the film itself tries too hard to feel up-to-date. When her son floats the idea of a bedtime song, Bridget says he’ll have to “make do with some early Take That“. You won’t begrudge this ’90s relic her happy ending.