Film review: ‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’

Despite the absence of Hugh Grant, the new foray will resonate with franchise fans.|

“Bridget Jones's Baby,” the third installment in the venerable “Bridget Jones” series, begins with Hugh Grant's funeral, which is a rather on-the-nose statement about the actor's career. But we miss Daniel, the enjoyable cad he played, and are thankful Renée Zellweger is still pratfalling along as Bridget, the heart pendant around her neck always slightly askew. At 43, her career in media is going strong but she's at the place where she gets questions about having kids and replies, “My eggs are hard-boiled.”

It seems that Mr. Grant has died so that Patrick Dempsey may live. The man, who's deeply forgettable in every film but a legend on “Grey's Anatomy,” plays Jack Qwant, a tech billionaire who has discovered the perfect algorithm for love. Bridget meets him while glamping at a sodden music festival (to her great credit, she does not recognize Ed Sheeran). and they enjoy a roll in the mud in a deluxe yurt.

Bridget then returns home to the tenuous embrace of her longtime love Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Mark woos Ms. Jones to bed with an exemplary use of that “I'm in the process of a divorce” line.

Realizing only too late that the “dolphin-safe” condoms she used with both gents were expired, Bridget discovers that she's been seeded by one of the two. Thinking of the demands of the plot rather than the miracles of modern medical science, she fails to determine the baby daddy. As both Jack and Mark are enthusiastic about supporting her, suffice to say, hijinks ensue.

Happily the film is British and rated R, so there is cursing in front of small children and workplace jokes about group sex. Physical comedy still plays and broad gay and Italian stereotypes are still funny. Emma Thompson predictably steals scenes as Bridget's obstetrician Dr. Rawlings. In reference to the heroine's gentlemen callers, she says the truest thing in the film: “You don't really need them.”

Still, one often tries to keep them around. And the biggest strength of “Bridget Jones's Baby” is watching age-appropriate romantic leads wrestle through emotional situations with actual feeling. Perhaps the adultness shows because it's that vanishingly rare wide-release film that's written and directed by women – Sharon Maguire helms from a screenplay by Helen Fielding with an assist from Thompson (… and Dan Mazer, the scribe of that feminist classic “Borat”).

As the titular baby comes to term you wait for Bridget to don an absurd costume, because that is usually the signal that something crucial is about to happen. Thus, when she steps outside in a jacket apparently made from a blue shag rug, you know the moment is close.

Late on, Maguire makes the odd but satisfying decision to cut in clips from the earlier “Bridget Jones” films. With a good deal of tenderness, the flashbacks show how Zellweger and Firth have aged since the “Diary” in 2001 – to see how film stock itself has aged – the world looks much different in the digital crispness of 2016. And it seems their love, while true, is mostly nostalgia for old times anyway.

Watch a trailer from the film below:

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