Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy — charming and crackingly funny
Now widowed and in her fifties, Bridget Jones navigates love, loss, and ‘labial lockdown’. Hugh Grant steals scenes, Emma Thompson delivers comic gold, and wet-shirted romance lives on.
“Bridget Jones. It’s time to live.” So Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger) jots in her diary early in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. She writes this entry soon after friends warn her that if she doesn’t have sex soon her “vagina will reseal”.
We learn that her husband, good guy lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), was killed during a humanitarian mission in Sudan four years before, leaving Bridget a widow with two pre-teen children, Billy (Casper Knopf) and Mabel (Mila Jankovic). She’s in her early 50s. Her one-time lover Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), a notorious womaniser, is still very much alive and kicking, but they are just friends. Every scene Grant is in is a treat. “We need to work on your bluffing and your cheating,” he advises Bridget’s kids ahead of a game of cards.
The prospects, then, to ward off labial lockdown are Roxster (Leo Woodall), who is close to half Bridget’s age, and Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a science teacher at the children’s school. The meet cute happens when Bridget’s children get stuck in a tree and she, attempting to retrieve them, gets stuck too. Mr Wallaker and Roxster happen to be in the park and ask if she needs help. “I’ve climbed a magical man tree,” she thinks.
Whether Bridget ends up with the straitlaced teacher or the toy boy student biochemist, or with both or neither, is for viewers to find out. The comedy is in the journey, not the destination, such as when Bridget goes into a store to purchase condoms and, not knowing who if anyone will don them, decides on a “representative selection”.
The comic highlight, though, comes from Emma Thompson as Dr Rawlings, Bridget’s gynaecologist. She’s only in two scenes but each one is worth the price of admission. The dialogue between doctor and patient is crackingly funny. Wait for the consultation after Bridget takes a lip serum. Subtitles are needed.
This film, the fourth in the Bridget Jones franchise that started in 2001, is full of Easter eggs for fans of the series, which is based on novels by British author Helen Fielding, who has been a co-scriptwriter from the beginning.
The best-known one – a hunky man in a wet white shirt, a take on Firth’s celebrated scene as Mr Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice – is used wonderfully this time around, with the subtitular 1930s Noel Coward song, Mad About the Boy, there for emphasis as Roxster dives into a swimming pool to save a dog.
It’s repeated a bit later when Mr Wallaker, on a camping trip, takes off his shirt. Bridget sees what she doesn’t want to unsee and utters one of the best lines of the film: “Ding f..king dong”.
Bridget’s internal thoughts are central to the humour of this well-written movie, which is directed by English filmmaker Michael Morris, a former director of the Old Vic Theatre in London. It’s his second film following To Leslie (2022).
It’s entertaining, funny, charming, has its serious moments, centred on Billy’s lack of a father figure, and by and large avoids sentimentality. This is said to be the final Bridget Jones film but I wouldn’t bet on that. As Bridget says of Daniel, “Some things never change.”
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (M)
124 minutes
In cinemas
★★★½