Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy review — A bloated, weeping sogfest

To paraphrase her own mode of self-criticism, this latest instalment in the saga of hapless London singleton Bridget Jones is v v poor. Michael Morris’s film, adapted from Helen Fielding’s fourth novel, is a bloated, weeping sogfest that blunders laboriously through the established tropes of the series. London property porn? Check. Baying, drunk, media types? Check. Have-your-cake-and-don’t-eat-it references to society’s obsession with youth, beauty and thinness? Check.

All the old cast is back together, with some lubricious young blood pumped in, and there’s a half-hearted attempt to move the emotional dial forwards to confront age and loss. Renee Zellweger gives a performance that’s impressive in its clownish vulnerability.

But the brittle British accent and physical tics she initially brought to Bridget - the self-conscious totter, head-cocks and winsome pursed moues - have now become so magnified our heroine looks like an alien who learned to pass for human by watching silent movies, or possibly footage of geckos. Hugh Grant’s efficient cameo as incorrigible lothario Daniel Cleaver carries a whiff of Nosferatu about it now that he’s perving over women one-third his age. Most of the supporting cast, with the honourable exception of Chiwetel Ejiofor as a hunky science teacher, phone it in.

Having blown hot and cold on her uptight lawyer lover Mark Darcy over the first three stories, Bridget has now comprehensively lost him to a bomb in the Sudan (Colin Firth dully pops up as a glum spectre). He left her well off, though: she’s given up her TV producer job to fail full-time at parenting their two adorably anarchic young kids (Casper Knox and Mila Jankovic) in an enormous, stylishly squalid Hampstead house. Bridget’s past feelings of inadequacy in the workplace and the romantic arena have transferred seamlessly to the sleek helicopter mums at the (private) school gates, who have kids called Eros and Atticus.

BJ’s also given up on sex, even though Daniel reflexively tries it on while doing duty as a corrupting babysitter to her kids. But oh god, here comes the yammering horde of her booze-fuelled friends, concern briefly masking their naked solipsism, to insist she goes on Tinder before her vagina fuses together. Although this being Bridget, she instead pratfalls into a relationship with hot and much younger park ranger and “garbagolist” Roxster (Leo Woodall, primarily acting with his shirtless upper body).

The simultaneous arrival of a gorgeous and ultra-capable nanny (Nico Parker, daughter of Thandiwe Newton and director Ol Parker) ensures Bridget feels her age. But bolstered by feasting on young flesh, she breezes back into her old job and rediscovers her can-do confidence amid her complaining middle-aged colleagues. There are some predictable setbacks, but it will surprise no one that things resolve themselves happily, and largely age-appropriately. This being a Working Title production, it concludes during a perfectly snowy festive season.

Fielding’s script, written with Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan, is more interested in how you navigate grief as a partner, a parent, or as a child, than in the actual dynamics of May-to-December relationships or the wider encroachment of mortality. Even here, it quickly gets mired in mawkishness.

Bridget Jones’s Diary started out as a mid-90s newspaper-column spoof of Pride and Prejudice and while no one would begrudge Fielding the success of the subsequent books and films, they’ve steadily decreased in sophistication and wit. Retirement now surely beckons for Bridget.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is in cinemas from 13th February