I am not a fan of Bridget Jones, I saw the first movie and was duly irritated by her, I skipped the second movie, but I went to see this one with a gun to my head. I’ve never been able to relate to this type of movie, I find characters like Bridget sloppy, and annoying and just… silly. Yes I know, I know, unpopular opinion but hey ho tally-ho. Still, in the first movie I felt a modicum of something for her as I sat through the entire viewing, in this instalment, I was pretty much done by the opening scene, but I couldn’t walk out because my friend paid £15 for me to see this movie. Sidebar; when did cinema tickets become so bloody expensive?!! Back to Bridget and this opening scene, it’s her birthday, she’s all alone, feeling morose about it, another year, same old Bridget. I suppose that’s most of us when our birthdays come round, we take stock of our lives and it’s always as pretty a picture as we’d hoped. The score went from All By Myself, to Jump Around by, cliché and it was all downhill from there. Her funnier friend invites her to go glamping, Bridget screws up the attire, finds herself at Glastonbury, dressed in white jeans and white sweater, trawling around mud in high heels… how old is this chick again? She falls face down in the mud, gets rescued by some American dreamy dude and by night fall they are shagging like rabbits; the next morning she pulls the sex and dash move. Fast forward a few weeks later she bumps into Darcy again at a friend’s whatever, and they too have sex, who the fuck knows why she’d sleep with that boring old fart. Fast forward some more, Bridget finds out she’s knocked up; who’s the baby daddy? And so it goes.
In the sum of its parts this film is funny, but as a whole the storyline was a cliched clusterfuck. So she’s a successful news producer whose job is threatened by a young’un who cares nothing for the news, she is still making the same old mistakes and the storyline shows she hasn’t much moved on from where we left her. The premise here is somewhat funny, but mostly stupid; having two men on the rope for being potential baby daddies, men who actually want to be baby daddies, duking it out with each other, trying to out baby daddy the other is unreal and corny as they come, and its not even the cute kind of corny. Vegan condoms at the bottom of her bag from the year 1600 is the reason why Bridge gets knocked up and finds herself in an even stupider predicament which takes me back to the same sentiment of Bridget never having moved on with her life; still falling for the wrong type of guys, still pining away for possibly the MOST BORING MAN ON EARTH with his stiff upper lip and propriety. I get that he is meant to channel the archetypal Brit but its a terrible representation of whatever type of British man he should be. But what makes me even more irritated by this movie is that whilst he moved with his life, got married, has a wonderful career, got divorced, the writers couldn’t give Bridget some semblance of a life to be getting on with. They replayed that stigma of the single career woman in her 30s, and the only way she gets the guy is to hook him with a baby which she was not even sure was his? Oh Fuck right off.
Perhaps more irritating is the fact that this Bridget Jones we hardly know. There was something to like about Bridget and her diary from the first movie; she was at least endearing, cutely fickle, funny, and graceless. A regular girl like us with a messy love life in all her granny pants glory, and as we have grown into adulthood we’d hope she would too. But here we are moving on with our lives and where is Bridget? In aisle 12 trying to decipher the difference between vegan and non-vegan condoms, with a bottle of vodka in hand. What a waste of £15.