Finally, A ‘Bridget Jones’ Sequel You Might Want To Watch Again

Bridget Jones’s Diary started as a newspaper column by Helen Fielding, became a megabestselling novel in 1996 and was adapted as a 2001 movie that grossed close to $300 million worldwide. Of course producers and audiences have wanted to keep this franchise churning out more installments across multiple media — more books, more movies, even a stage musical that never quite worked out. If you’re like me and loved the first novel and movie, you probably can’t remember anything about subsequent additions to the franchise beyond moderate to severe disappointment: After all, most stories in this genre end on “happily ever after” for a reason. And while the original Bridget Jones’s Diary is untouchable among both romcom AND Christmas movies, Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy seems to have been made by people who know that, and know what you loved about it.

Bridget Jones’s Diary was winning for a lot of reasons, not least that it was a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, one of the greatest comic novels in the English canon. In place of Elizabeth Bennett, we get the titular Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger); roguish Mr. Wickham is transformed into Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant in one of his most charming performances). The least strain went into reimagining Mr. Darcy: here he’s Mark Darcy and he’s played by Colin Firth, who also played Mr. Darcy in BBC’s 1995 miniseries adaptation, possibly still best known for a scene you definitely do not remember from English class.

Just as Lizzie does, Bridget learns (the hard way) why you can’t plan a future with a bounder like Daniel, and that writing off Mark for seeming like a dull snob is just as bad as his dismissal of Bridget for attending a family holiday party in borrowed Boomer clothes and overcompensating by bragging about how much she drank the night before. 

The turning point comes when Bridget flees a dinner party full of Smug Marrieds and Mark stops her on her way out.

Sure, there’s the pantsless, snow-dusted kiss that closes the movie, but what could be more romantic than a declaration that someone sees your flaws, and loves them?

The first sequel, The Edge of Reason, is also based on a Jane Austen novel. This time, it’s Persuasion, Austen’s last completed book — a comedy, like the others, but a more muted one, telling the story of a thwarted romance rekindled in a time of greater maturity (or, at least, more advanced age). I hope it goes without saying that nothing in Austen corresponds to a dance party in a Thai prison cell.

It’s not that this aged poorly; it was also unacceptable in its day.

Bridget Jones’s Baby is based on Fielding’s columns from the mid-aughts. In that version, Bridget is pregnant and doesn’t know whether the father is Mark or Daniel, but since Hugh Grant declined to appear, the decision was made, wisely, not to recast him; instead, the movie opens on a memorial for Daniel, who’s been presumed dead following a plane crash, and Mark’s rival is an American named Jack Quant (Patrick Dempsey, and thinking of him as America’s answer to Hugh Grant kind of says it all). Returning to the love-triangle setup the franchise started with is one smart move — having Oscar-winning screenwriter Emma Thompson to do a rewrite on the script is another — but Grant is a staple ingredient; his absence sours the flavor of the final dish. Between Grant’s abstention and critical punditry about Zellweger’s appearance so revolting that she had to respond, the vibes on Baby are in shambles. 

The one thing Baby does right is close on a report that Daniel’s been found alive, which opens the door for him to return for Mad About The Boy — almost immediately, in fact. We open on Bridget at home, rushing to feed her kids before a night out: the titular Baby is now 11-year-old Billy (Casper Knopf), and has been joined by a sister, Mabel (Mila Jakovic). She calls Daniel — coming up in his vintage Motorola flip phone as “DIRTY DIRTY BITCH” — and reminds him that he’s supposed to be there to babysit; he ducks out of a reading of his twentysomething girlfriend’s terrible poetry to teach the kids how to make cocktails and cheat at cards. Bridget meets Mark on the sidewalk in front of the friend’s house where they’ll be dining, but we soon learn that Mark’s not actually there. It’s the fourth anniversary of the day he was killed by a bomb on a humanitarian mission in Sudan, and Bridget is still figuring out her life as a widow.

Like Max’s And Just Like That… — another contemporary addition to a wildly popular pop cultural franchise that started as a confessional print column and is now portraying both the pain of widowhood and its possibilities — Mad About The Boy (which started streaming on Peacock today, and débuts in theaters this weekend) is arguably fancy fan service. Both properties’ core audiences have aged along with the actors who played their protagonists, and want to see how their faves have ended up. While Like That’s Carrie Bradshaw is operating from a sturdy base of unimaginable wealth, Bridget has an enviable amount of support — not just Daniel but also the old friends we met in the original movie, her former TV colleagues and the gynecologist (Emma Thompson) who is apparently so fond of Bridget that she treats such non-gynecological ailments as Mabel’s worms and Bridget’s lip serum mishaps. Even Nicolette (Leila Farzad), the mean mom at the kids’ school, isn’t too mean to volunteer an excellent nanny (Nico Parker). 

Oh, and Bridget’s also independently wealthy, apparently, given that the reason she needs a nanny is that she’s only going back to work now. So, yes, Bridget’s life is still aspirational even before she has a meet-cute with Roxster (Leo Woodall), a Parks department staffer who moonlights as a student of biochemistry — officially a mature student, at the advanced age of 29.

But: Bridget is still Bridget, the adorable mess Mark liked, very much, just as she was. The young woman who ran down a snowy street in her underwear is now the mom who walks her kids to school in her pajamas; the producer who slid down the pole at a fire station flashing the camera her butt is now the breakfast TV producer screaming about her sexploits in front of a studio audience she doesn’t know is quietly eavesdropping behind her. The half-assed cook who turned her leek soup blue with colored string is now setting dry pasta on fire on the stove; I’m not actually sure how. Of course Bridget doesn’t remember which curse word she made her Netflix password: she wouldn’t be Bridget if she did.

The film’s fan service also extends to the characters we got to know in the original film — all older, none wiser. Shazzer (Sally Phillips) is still foul-mouthed and opinionated, but now she’s a podcast host. Tom (James Callis) is still a trifler living off his one-hit single’s royalties, but now they’re coming from viral videos. Bridget’s mother Pam (Gemma Jones) is still a twittering traditionalist, now from a retirement residence everyone has agreed to pretend is a hotel. But no one is more himself than Daniel, still directing his sexual energy everywhere he thinks it might find a receptive audience; healing his estrangement from his equally horny teen son Enzo (Alessandro Bedetti) may be as close as we get to growth, even though it shares a scene with Daniel teaching a table full of children how to make a Dirty Bitch, his signature cocktail. (Tasting their work: “Christ. That may even be a Filthy Bitch.”)

Throughout, we get nods to the first film: a Smug Marrieds dinner party where Bridget is once again the featured singleton, now from the other side of her own marriage; blue cocktails that recall the blue leek soup; Bridget’s old sheer top and terrifying shapewear; and, of course, the diary in which she records her plans to do better — plans that now largely revolve around her parenting. Roxster himself is a faint nod to both Bridget’s prospects from the original story: a fun hang who’s probably not right for the long haul (like Daniel), and a romantic hero who stuns by getting his white shirt aaaaaaaaall wet (like Mr. Darcy in another iteration of Mark’s story.)

These references, along with a closing-credits montage of stills and clips from previous films (the middle two being, expectedly, much less represented), make Mad About The Boy read as the end of Bridget’s story. If true, it’s a shame: This creative team seems to have remembered what we like about it, just as it is.