Bigpants strikes again: "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy"

So help me, she's back: Britfilm's own Michael Myers, the postergirl for Richard Curtis monoculture, the drippiest creation in all 21st century cinema, the most regrettable legacy of Tony Blairs' New Labours, up to and including the second Gulf War. Nine years on from Bridget Jones's Baby, which dropped in the year of Brexit (had we not suffered enough?), Bridget (Renée Zellweger) is back, squinty or grinning, sometimes squinty and grinning, her babies (plural now) in their early schoolyears. Their father, the other Mr. Darcy, is a goner, alas: Colin Firth judged there's more fun to be had reinvestigating the Lockerbie bombing, though he's one of several familiar faces making a ghostly cameo early on as Mad About The Boy strives to remind us of this franchise's former (ahem) glories. Drifting in to deliver a line or two in our heroine's Darcyless and child-strafed but nevertheless well-appointed and semi-aspirational kitchen: Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent as Bridget's ma and pa, those wacky pals (Sally Phillips, James Callis et al.) who in 2001 resembled some Anglo equivalent of those aggravating twats in millennial Doritos ads, Neil Pearson from Drop the Dead Donkey, and - of course - the big pants. Remember them? Garlic bread?! Low bar though this is, it is, all told, the most intriguing set-up as there's been for a Bridget Jones movie. Is Bridget, plunged into middle-aged solitude and stalked through her nothingy life by all these ghosts from her past, actually, literally going mad? Will the series come to an end with the nation's favourite nincompoop committing some terrible, unforgivable atrocity in the Oliver Bonas on Hampstead High Street?

No, she just needs a shag. That's what Mad About the Boy invites its audience to speculate on for two hours: who will be next to fill up the empty squinty lady? (Both short-term and full-time applicants sought.) We learn that Bridget is now on Tinder, because there's apparently nothing funnier than hearing a small child asking "Mummy, what's Tinder?" And in the non-virtual world, the contenders assemble. Hugh Grant's Daniel Cleaver is up for it - when was he not? - but settles for serving as a willing babysitter and the one interesting figure in the whole movie: an aging roué/sex pest facing up to the notion of dying alone, a craggy character actor stuck in a piffling pantomime, the only person associated with this franchise to have evolved in any dramatic and tangible way. His romantic rivals this time out are far less compelling. Chiwetel Ejiofor has to tone down everything (save his abs) as the science teacher Mr. Wallaker, whose only identifiable characteristic is "possesses own whistle". When Bridget gets stuck up a tree on the Heath (oh Bridget, that's so Bridget), she's rescued by Leo Woodall, the childproofed Michael Pitt from One Day and that dull maths show no-one's watching on Apple. There's even a scene where the hunky guy behind a cafe counter asks Bridget whether she wants to go for a drink, and she says "no thank you, I've got a boyfriend", only - get this! - he was talking about adding a drink to her Meal Deal! Cringe! Squint! Oh Bridget/That's so Bridget!

Imbecilic as much of this is, you can at least see what the intention is: to do something positive and non-judgmental with late-life sex and older woman-younger man romance, like a version of 2022's Good Luck to You, Leo Grande emptied of all insight. That film's Emma Thompson recurs here as Bridget's gynaecologist and general voice of common sense; one of her scenes still ends with Bridget's daughter trying to pronounce the word "syphilis". (That's so Bridget's daughter.) Michael Morris, taking a promotion that feels like a demotion after his work on Better Call Saul and the Oscar-nominated To Leslie, does a worse job of directing than even the first and third film's Sharon Maguire. It's not his fault he's working from an artlessly episodic script that shows no more idea of how TV and the media work than the first movie and invests all these relationships with zero depth and weight. It is his fault, and the fault of some deeply perfunctory, point-and-shoot lensing, that Mad About the Boy emerges as just about the one Britfilm of the past fifteen years that apparently hasn't a clue how to make London - Hampstead, even - look attractive. (He makes Richard Curtis seem like Stanley Kubrick: I wasn't expecting a 2025 release to remind me so forcefully of Truffaut's waspish comment about British cinema being a contradiction in terms, but here we are.) His needledrops - one means by which a director could pump some life and fun into these frames - are persistently unimaginative: Dinah Washington (as per the title) after Woodall jumps into a pool to rescue a dog, Fatboy Slim's "Praise You" over a middle-class knees-up, a John Lewis cover of Erasure's "A Little Respect" when Bridget is Sad. (Sit through the end credits at your peril: a Robbie Williams swing number lurks in wait.) Mostly it's people you know off the telly being caught with their shirts off or their pants (big or otherwise) down, like binging a season of The Brittas Empire with far fewer laughs; it's going straight-to-streaming in the US, which may end up being the sanest decision taken during the second Trump administration. I'm guessing there was a lot of free alcohol flowing before the UK press screenings, judging from the inexplicably glowing reviews, which themselves betray flickers of Trumpish protectionism. Bridget Jones is a witless dullard, but she's our witless dullard; the films made in her name may be shite, but they are, unmistakably, our shite.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy opens in cinemas nationwide today.