Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

Directed by Beeban Kidron

Universal Pictures

Bridget’s back and this time she’s counting carbs, not calories.

There are some other surface changes in the life of the world’s favorite singleton: she’s shacked up with the dreamy Darcy and is no longer, well, single. But the script is furnished with the same jokes from the first movie, except the second time the “watch Bridget fall flat on her face in a very short skirt” routine is less vaudeville and more ritual humiliation. Bridget is, quite literally, the butt of the joke.

The movie begins with a dead end, plot wise. Bridget (Renee Zellweger) is deliriously happy with her “top human rights lawyer” of a boyfriend Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). She texts that she’s “missing you already” immediately after they kiss each other goodbye in the morning and Bridget makes a lot of fuss about their fabulous sex life, or in Bridget-speak, their frequent “shagathons.”

There is, however, nothing less funny than happiness. Something’s gotta give.

Sure enough, quintessential bad-boy Daniel “Skirt” Cleaver (Hugh Grant) saunters on the scene. Cleaver hosts a wildly successful travel show, “The Smooth Guide” (sample travel tips: “When in Rome, do it with a Roman;” “In New York, sex and the city isn’t a program, it’s a promise”). Cue dramatic break-up scene with the too-good-to-be-true Darcy, allowing Bridget to be free for a naughty dabble with Cleaver. What follows are a series of ever-more improbable plot twists which end up with Bridget stuck in a Thai jail—surely one of the strangest settings for the climax of a romantic comedy.

On the way out, one can’t help but feel that this sequel betrays the delightfully subversive spirit of Helen Fielding’s comic creation. Admittedly, the raw material was less-than-stellar: putting aside the side-splitting botched interview with Colin Firth which for obvious reasons could not be included in the movie (having Colin Firth play Colin Firth would be far too Spike Jonze), the novel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason lacks the consistent hilarity and striking originality of its predecessor, Bridget Jones’ Diary.

The movie is not just less funny than the first, but also seems to perpetuate, rather than poke fun at, the ridiculous conventions of the Hollywood romantic comedy. What connected audiences to Bridget’s stories is that she was a more lovable version of us all, bumbling her way through mishap after mishap with an excess of charm. Sadly, in this movie, our everywoman, and, by extension, singletons everywhere, are turned into the nastiest joke of all.

One of the most frustrating example of the difference between the tone of the two films comes as Bridget tries to deal with relationship disasters. In the first, after a typical episode of dastardly behavior from Daniel Clever, Bridget declared her process of healing as follows: “I choose vodka. And Chaka Khan.” In the second movie, a similar moment of heartache has her “enjoying a relationship with two men at once: Ben and Jerry.” Watching women channel their emotions into cookie dough ice-cream? Nothing has a higher yawn factor.

There are some glimpses of the old Bridget: smart, funny, wholly lacking in decorum. In one of the most compelling indictments against private education ever set forth on screen, Bridget describes Darcy’s alma mater, Eton, as “one of those fascist institutions where they stick a poker up your arse which you’re not allowed to take out for the rest of your life.” She takes on the uptight lawyers at one of Darcy’s work functions, railing against their tiresome Tory belief systems but oblivious to their increasingly shocked facial expressions.

And of course, there are her typically madcap, but nonetheless adorable self-help mantras: “I’ve read that you should never go out with someone if you think of three reasons why you shouldn’t,” she declares to Darcy, before breaking up with him because he folds his underpants before bed.

But these oh-so Bridget moments are outnumbered by the formulaic structure of the narrative, to the point where we’re not sure whether this is Notting Hill, Love Actually, or just some hideous amalgam of all the other resolutely WASPy, sickly-sweet Richard Curtis creations: There’s the wacky car chase through central London to a Motown soundtrack. The even wackier minor characters that swear like sailors and smoke like particularly industrious chimneys. Bridget falling flat on her face, a lot. Further plundering of the Aretha Franklin catalog. And, of course, that stalwart of the rom-com genre, Hugh Grant, walking on eggshells and flopping his fringe on the way into cinematic oblivion.

The ending throws out all pretense of originality or integrity. At one point when Bridget is making a romantic declaration, she apologizes, since “I know there’s no music playing and it’s not snowing.” I don’t think I’m giving much away when I say the movie ends with snow and music. It’s a Christmas Card-type scene at a church with Bridget Jones reassuring us “I truly believe happiness is possible—even when you’re 33 and have a bottom the size of two bowling balls.”

Is this what it has all come to? The hand-in-hand walk into the sunset (or in this case, snowstorm) is an ending not out of place in a 1950s Doris Day vehicle. The only thing that’s changed is that we are now encouraged to make fun of our leading lady’s (not at all enormous) bottom. What about her career, and her friends, and her family? Do they exist only to fill in the gaps between men?

Apparently none of this matters, because Bridget has her Prince Charming back for good. I for one am tired of being fed the same old schlock to the same old soundtrack, and by the end of this paint-by-numbers exercise, I’m pretty sure you will be too.

—Amelia E. Lester