MOVIE REVIEW: Bridget Jones's Baby

Mark (Colin Firth), Bridget (Renee Zellweger) and Jack (Patrick Dempsey) form a love triangle in Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Baby.
Mark (Colin Firth), Bridget (Renee Zellweger) and Jack (Patrick Dempsey) form a love triangle in Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Baby.

Another generation has been born since Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger) first stumbled around for love and then wrote about it in 2001, so it's no surprise that she's finally in the family way herself.

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Bridget (Renee Zellweger) and her new American beau, Jack (Patrick Dempsey), cavort in Bridget Jones’s Baby.

Thankfully, novelist and screenwriter Helen Fielding's struggling singleton has actually picked a good time to return to the screen. At this time in her life, she's got a lot more on her mind than finding a new beau.

Bridget Jones’s Baby

83 Cast: Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey, Emma Thompson, Sarah Solemani, Gemma Jones, Jim Broadbent, Kate O’Flynn, Enzo Cilenti

Director: Sharon Maguire

Rating: R, for language, sex references and some nudity

Running time: 122 minutes

After a longer period of on-again-off-again relationships with successful lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), he has eventually married someone else, and the other man in her life Daniel (played in the first two films by Hugh Grant) has been in a plane crash.

With both men unavailable, Bridget devotes herself to being a TV news producer and has apparently gotten good enough at the job that she feeds the show's host Miranda (Sarah Solemani) her questions. She becomes especially determined when her new boss (Kate O'Flynn) wants to use the chat show to discuss cat videos instead of hard news, as the series' title would suggest.

When her 43rd birthday only makes her feel lonely, she and Miranda go to a music festival where she meets the handsome and well-heeled American web developer Jack (Patrick Dempsey). She later manages to rekindle her feelings for Mark.

None of this would matter much if Bridget hadn't used a uniquely ineffective form of birth control.

Now she has two admittedly likable suitors who have an equal chance of being the father and a job that has gotten more stressful by the second. Her OB-GYN (Emma Thompson) only seems to make the situation more unpleasant by reminding Bridget of the unpleasant realities of new motherhood and how her biological clock could work against her.

Thompson's biting assessments of Bridget's situation are sometimes more fun than the trouble the patient got herself into in the first place. Thompson also co-wrote the script, and there are several choice barbs throughout the movie that sound as if she coined them.

It doesn't take much effort to figure out which man is the real father and her true love. That said, director Sharon Maguire, who helmed the first movie, and the screenwriters treat both potential fathers as prime choices, giving the story some tension it wouldn't have if either one of them was a twit.

Zellweger can still make viewers sympathetic toward Bridget's misfortunes in part because Bridget has some traces of wisdom to go with the passing years.

After all, she might break a bone if she fell as often as she did in the first two films. While Bridget's dive into motherhood might not have been ideal, she probably wouldn't have made it to 43 if she had stayed an eternal train wreck.

Like her forthcoming offspring, it isn't as if anyone except Comcast shareholders begged for Bridget Jones's Baby, but now that it has arrived it's easy to be charmed by it.

MovieStyle on 09/16/2016

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