Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason Reviews

The genius of novelist Helen Fielding's shallow, silly and compulsively readable Bridget Jones's Diary was Bridget herself. A neurotic charmer who eats, smokes and drinks to excess, dates dreadful men, sabotages her own ambitions and then castigates herself in her diary, Bridget struck a chord with a generation of self-loathing women convinced by self-help gurus that all their problems — from fat knees to workplace inequality — are the product of their own inadequacies. Sadly, in both Fielding's sequel and Beeban Kidron's fat-joke-filled follow-up to BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (2001), all Bridget's (Renee Zellweger) problems are her own fault. She's degenerated into a clingy, obsessive, lumpen caricature of her former sparkling self, so witless and galling that Lucy Ricardo seems a steady, self-confident font of common sense by comparison. Six weeks after the end of the first film, which united Bridget and upper-crust human-rights lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the intrepid Bridget is skydiving bottom-first into a pigpen in the name of television journalism. This is the first of many cheap jokes at Bridget's expense, followed by Bridget's tumble from Mark's skylight, Bridget's makeup mishap en route to a staid party, Bridget's graceless pratfall from a ski lift and her mortifying pantomime at a Swiss ski-spa pharmacy where no one speaks enough English to understand the words "pregnancy test." Every humiliation is cushioned by Mark's impossible perfection on the boyfriend front, so she's naturally compelled to bollix up everything. On the hopelessly bad advice of friends Shazzer (Sally Phillips), Jude (Shirley Henderson) and Tom (James Callis) — no, she never learns — Bridget eventually picks a relationship-souring fight over Mark's associate, the impossibly leggy Rebecca Gillies (Jacinda Barrett), and soon after finds herself in Bangkok filming a segment of "The Smooth Report," a boorish travelogue hosted by sleazy sex-addict Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). Bridget nearly succumbs again to ex-flame Cleaver's smarmy blandishments, gets arrested for smuggling cocaine — a big misunderstanding, of course — and tossed into a hellish Thai prison, where she teaches her battered, drug-addicted cellmates to sing "Like a Virgin" and brings some sunshine into their lives with gifts of fancy bras, chocolate bars and copies of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. There's more — much more — and it's all equally labored and dispiriting. Readers who fell in love with Bridget laughed along with her mishaps. But like the oily Daniel, Kidron's film is merely laughing at her.