Review: Bridget Jones’s Baby
Last evening I went to see the relatively current movie Bridget Jones’s Baby with my thirty-something daughter. It’s not normally the kind of film that I’d go to watch and she reported that her mates and cousins have been marvelling either that a father would want to see it all, let alone that she was prepared to see it with me!
[Last night after getting home I spent some time trying to remember the previous occasion that I’d been to the cinema. Eventually I reckoned it must have been at least five or six years ago, though I cannot for the life of me recall which film I might have seen.]
I’d seen the two previous Bridget Jones movies on television and found then reasonably entertaining. Plus, the reviews for this one had been encouraging – the general verdict seemed to be “Well, better than the second, at any rate!”
The audience was 75% female and under forty, which kind of figured when in the movie Bridget was 43 and still single, albeit now a white wine-swilling accident prone TV news producer rather than some sort of research assistant as had been the case in her previous outing.
It was frothy, fun and sassy in about equal measure although it wasn’t long before I personally found myself beginning to ‘disconnect’.
As Bridget, American actress Renée Zelleweger was once again excellent, right down to her English accent. There was little plot to speak of – both Colin Firth, reprising his role as Mark Darcy, and an American billionaire mogul bedded Bridget in fairly short order … she then became pregnant … and it soon became clear to all that she didn’t know which of them was the father. The bulk of the action thereafter was a series of scenes of late thirty-something/early forty-something women behaving badly and comic set pieces involving the prospective fathers and the impending birth.
Undoubtedly there were terrific moments of the comedic variety and several cracking one-liners. That wasn’t my problem – they were anticipated (the reviews had hand-picked the best of them anyway, thus it was a case of ‘enjoying’ what you had been expecting anyway when they came along).
No – what ‘turned’ it for me was the swearing. And that’s coming from someone who’s no stranger to eff words and the like.
You’ll no doubt remember the opening to Four Weddings And A Funeral, when Hugh Grant’s character and a young red-headed girl have woken up late and thereafter have to get ready in a hurry and rush to a church. I’m talking about the fact that in it – as a way of both shocking/amusing the audience and positioning the movie as sort-of ‘contemporary and edgy’ – writer Richard Curtis has both actors utter few words other than ‘Fuck!” for several scenes as they struggle to get to the wedding concerned.
Bridget Jones Baby was just like that at times – which I thought was a bit naff and lazy from the scriptwriters, headed by Helen Fielding the originator and writer behind the entire Bridget Jones oeuvre.
For periods, every female in the movie, and then on other occasions even some extremely young children, are effing and blinding all over the place. It soon became boring and then I became irritated by it. Couldn’t they have come up with something funnier or newer? Simply stealing something from another movie (even if that movie is now 22 years old so may not have been seen by today’s teens and twenty-somethings) isn’t good enough in my view.
To sign off, a mention for Emma Thompson, who makes a cameo appearance as Bridget’s gynaecologist for which I believe she wrote most of her own script. Both script and her acting performance were excellent.
