Bridget Jones’s Baby
(7/10)
by Tony Medley
Runtime 122 minutes.
Not for children.
This thing needs some
serious editing and a script doctor. The first half is run away and hide
annoying. It’s nauseatingly politically correct, contrived, unfunny, and
boring. Worse, it goes out of its way to ensure that every single female
in the first part of the movie drops F-bombs all over the place, even a
10 year old girl. Funny? Not!
But after it’s made
all its political points (or at least most of them) and gotten into the
meat of the plot, it actually gets interesting and sometimes humorous.
Bridget (Renée
Zellweger) is now officially a spinster, since she’s 42 and unmarried
after things didn’t work out too well with Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) in
past films. Now she’s the director of a TV News Program. She goes to a
festival and has a one night stand with Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey),
then reconnects with Mark for another one-nighter, only to find herself
pregnant without any idea which of her two boyfriends is the father.
Once all these facts
have been painstakingly (and I don’t use that word lightly) established,
the film settles down into a Doris Day-Rock Hudson-type romcom,
something that Zellweger and director Sharon Maguire pull off very well.
I’ve seen most of Zellweger’s films and IMHO, this is by far her best
performance after she navigates her way out of the deplorable first
half. She just simply grabs the movie and takes hold of it. I had been
looking at my watch every minute or so, willing the time to move on in
its flight when all of a sudden I was swept up in the film
and
forgot about the passage of time. The last hour is very good.
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