Film reviews: Bridget Jones’s Baby; Spin Out; Blair Witch

It’s 12 years since Bridget Jones found love on our cinema screens. Do we still care about her romantic wellbeing?

Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones celebrates her 43rd birthday.

The title of Bridget Jones’s Baby means we don’t need a spoiler alert before revealing that the primal source of drama and humour in this romantic comedy is that Bridget (Renee Zellweger) is up the duff. The question is, who is the father? Bridget is not exactly tawdry but she does describe herself as a SPILF, a spinster’s pun on an acronym we’d best not spell out.

We first meet the Bridget we have come, over the two previous films, to know, love (maybe) and feel sorry for. She’s alone in her London flat, marking her 43rd birthday with a candle on a cupcake. The booze-infused singing and dancing in the living room will come.

“How in the hell did I end up here again?” she asks herself. “The truth is that by now I thought I would have had a little baby to love, with the square-jawed hero of my life.’’

She thinks she has had two loves, but “one is dead and one is married’’. That introduces the sparring blokes we also know well, uptightish lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and louche publisher Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), who we are told has died in an accident.

Fortunately another contender enters the fray: Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey, McDreamy from the TV series Gray’s Anatomy), who is American and had made a fortune through an matchmaking business.

Long story short, Bridget sleeps with Darcy and Qwant (on separate occasions, for the record) and falls pregnant. This brings her to a confusing, sometimes amusing turning point. How to tell the men? How to work out who is the dad? The obvious solutions — DNA testing, for example — are avoided so the fun and games can continue for two hours.

This film is directed by Sharon Maguire, who made the first one in 2001. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason was directed by Beeban Kidron. The novelist who created Bridget Jones, Helen Fielding, continues as scriptwriter, helped by Dan Mazer (a collaborator with Sacha Baron Cohen) and actress Emma Thompson.

And it is Thompson who steals the show as the droll Dr Rawlings, an obstetrician who has seen it all and is not surprised by anything. Her unflappable but gentle approach to Bridget is a highlight, as is the prenatal class featuring mum and the two putative dads. This being a Bridget Jones movie, expect a punch-up between two blokes who don’t know how to fight.

Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones return as Bridget’s parents and her old friends pop up too. Pamela Jones is interesting in an embarrassing way: it’s a bit like daughter, like mother.

This third instalment is not as funny or as original as its predecessors — and sorely misses Grant — but it’s an enjoyable enough entertainment for a Friday night at the cinema.

The Australian country comedy Spin Out is co-directed and co-written by Tim Ferguson, the writer, comedian and former member of Doug Anthony All Stars. The co-director is Marc Gracie and the co-writer is Edwina Exton.

Filmed in Shepparton, Victoria, it centres on a beer and rum-soaked bachelors and spinsters ball and two childhood friends, Billy (Xavier Samuel) and Lucy (Morgan Griffin), who piss off each other but may also be enamoured.

This hate-love relationship reaches crisis point during a ute-driving contest — “Driving in circles, really fast’’ — in which Billy and Lucy are teammates. She decides the time has come to leave the bush and move to Sydney. But first there is the B&S ball. “If you don’t get a root tonight it’s a year till the next one,’’ Billy warns. “I can wait,’’ she replies.

There are various other characters, with names such as Rooter and Turps. Billy’s dog, who has too many scenes, is called Knob. There are two well-groomed, Porsche-driving visitors from the city, a brother and sister who are also, well, looking for a root. There’s an explosive non-accident in an occupied Portaloo. There’s a pregnant woman hauling cases of beer because her spouse is trying to break a drinking record.

Samuel was good in the recent Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship but here his character doesn’t have much room to grow. There are a few good moments when he shows an internal struggle. But overall the characters are cliched, the story predictable and the jokes, for me at least, not funny.

Blair Witch is a sequel to the 1999 found footage horror landmark The Blair Witch Project, which cost $US60,000 to make and has earned almost $US250 million.

Directed by Adam Wingard, it picks up the story several years after the first film, in which three students making a documentary about a witch legend disappeared in the Black Hills woods of Maryland. Now another group of young filmmakers, James (James Allen Mc­Cune), Lisa (Callie Hernandez), Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid), have returned to the area to investigate.

James’s sister Heather is one of the original missing students and he believes she may still be alive, a hope encouraged by a video he finds online. He and his friends head to the woods and meet up with the strange young local couple who posted the video.

The wilderness is dark, there’s undecipherable noise, lots of sudden movements, some harmless, some not. Rustic icons, perhaps showing someone being tortured, appear around their tents.

Like the original, this is a handheld camera film, which some people, me included, find a bit hard to watch. There’s also an element of the action being more controlled. In other words, there are times when it looks more like a normal film, while still visually jerky.

I admit I was not a fan of the first film, but it was scarier. This sequel’s setting and the situation — and the thought that the problem is people, not witches — set up some unnerving moments. There is a focused, frightening scene in which Lucy crawls through an underground tunnel. But the reliance here is on jump scares rather than psychological horror and the result is less than spellbinding.

Bridget Jones’s Baby (M)

2.5 stars

National release

Spin Out (M)

1.5 stars

National release

Blair Witch (MA15+)

1.5 stars

National release