5/5/2005: Views: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 2004, dir. Beeban Kidron
Pfffttt. I know better than to compare a sequel to an original, or to compare a movie to a book, but this one was still a disappointment.
In Bridget Jones' Diary - both the book and, to a lesser extent, the movie - we liked Bridget and we cared about what happens to her. In this one she's not much more than a bumbling buffoon, with few redeeming qualities that explain her friends' and boyfriends' attraction to her. And all the time she's twitching.
Gone are the more amusing diary entry voiceovers, gone are the endearing qualities that make us overlook her accident-prone nature, and gone is every bit of her charm. Instead we have Renée Zellwiger twitchier and twitchier, acting like she's in a Three Stooges short, making the same idiotic blunders over and over that weren't funny the first time. When she bursts in on her straight-laced lawyer boyfriend's business meetings with sex talk or professions of love for the third or fourth time, well, it wasn't that funny the first time.
Both of Bridget's boyfriends are back again, and one of the few high points in the movie is when they have a rematch of their silly, ineffective, upper-class-twit version of a street fight. Hugh Grant is as charming as ever but slimier than before, and Colin Firth is still stiff and stuffy and dull. There's just not much that's attractive about any of the three personalities this time around.
To give you an idea of how sad this sequel is: Bridget lands in a Thai prison for smuggling cocaine (planted in her luggage, of course) - and she soon has the entire women's prison community singing Madonna songs before she's miraculously sprung from what would have been a 15-year sentence. The DVD also carries an interactive quiz along the lines of "What kind of boyfriend do you want?" Eleven- or twelve-year-old girls might like it.
There are a bunch of other DVD extras but I couldn't even sit through the deleted scenes, let alone whatever else was on there.
I don't really want to bother posting reviews of movies I didn't like, but there is one interesting factoid about this one. The "other woman" whom Bridget finds threatening - beautiful, young, thin, and competent - is played by Jacinda Barrett. Sound familiar? She was part of "The Real World" London cast (the model). A role in a feature film of this scale might give her the prize for the nearest approach to the stardom that most reality tv participants aspire to, but few make it beyond the reunion show.
