Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (now streaming on Peacock) finds Renee Zellweger revisiting her most iconic character, the endearingly klutzy and insecure perennial singleton with a penchant for penning amusingly foulmouthed diaries. Before we dive back into the patented Jones brand of interpersonal mortification, I think we need to take some inventory: This is the fourth film in the series based on novels by Helen Fielding, arriving 24 years after the first and nine after the last. Hugh Grant is back after taking the third film off, Patrick Dempsey is nowhere to be found and Colin Firth is relegated to a cameo, because something had to happen to his Mr. Darcy in order to contrive further romantic misadventures for Ms. Jones. New this time around are Leo Woodall (The White Lotus) and Chiwetel Ejiofor as her potential beaus, but there’s not much fundamentally new about our protagonist, despite her current status as a mother of two and a widow. The question is whether the formula still functions here in the Age of Tinder.
The Gist: Yes, widow. Not really a spoiler, because it’s in the trailers: Mr. Darcy (Firth), Bridget’s (Zellweger) long-lusted-after husband and father of her two kids, died in a car wreck during a humanitarian trip to Sudan. We drop in on Bridget, her quiet and reserved son Billy (Casper Knopf) and his little sis Mabel (Mila Jankovic) four years after he passed. The place is a mess – dishes and laundry and toys and papers and phones and video game controllers and a cat are scattered everywhere. Bridget hasn’t worked since the funeral, prompting one to wonder how anyone can just not work for four years, but whatever (life insurance payout, I guess). Soldier on past this, we must. She hasn’t been out in lord knows how long, and she’s throwing food at the kids and trying to zip herself into a dress so she can at last have drinks with former work friends who don’t hesitate to call her a “born-again virgin” and worry that her “vagina will reseal itself.” While she’s out, the kids’ “Uncle Daniel” (Grant) babysits, because she’s accepted his serial caddishness and they’ve become tight pals who banter with genial crassness.
One day, Bridget apparently hits rock-bottom when she fails to remember her Netflix password. So she pulls her old diaries off the shelf – she hasn’t written anything since Mr. Darcy died. She flashes back to her father (Jim Broadbent), dying in bed, telling her not to just survive, but live. So maybe it’s time for her to comb her hair for a change? She visits her doctor, because Bridget Jones movies have no reason to exist without two-to-three Emma Thompson scenes. The doc’s advice is for her to go the hell back to work, and the TV chat show she used to produce takes her back in an instant because they’ve been begging her to return for eons, which is just how real life works! A friend also snaps an unflattering photo of Bridget and builds a Tinder profile around it: “Tragic widow seeks sexual awakening,” her profile reads.
Who could perhaps revive Bridget’s erogenous zones this time, I wonder? Well, she takes the kids to the park and they get stuck in a tree and a 20-something set of all-caps BICEPS named Roxster (Woodall) helps them all down, which inevitably involves his head getting far too close to Bridget’s bum. Yes, Roxster. Like “rock star,” I guess. He finds her on Tinder and she agrees to a date and goes to the druggist (I think that’s what they call the pharmacy in England) and buys a variety of condoms, and the checkout lady proceeds to read all the prophylactic varieties out loud so everyone can hear, especially the kids’ new teacher, Mr. Wallaker (Ejiofor), as he stands in line behind her. “Have a nice weekend,” he quips.
Bridget’s date with Roxster goes smashingly. So smashingly, they end up smashing all the months between May and December together into a gooey stew of genital excretions. Sorry, rough imagery there. They have sex. Is that better? Anyway, Bridget coasts on the ego boost that inevitably occurs when you’re sleeping with a highly attractive someone who’s blankety-blank years younger than her. Roxster even likes hanging out with her and the kids. She finds some purpose at work, and seems to be pulling herself out of the stinky ol’ funk. But how long can this last, realistically? Meanwhile, typically embarrassing random Bridget Jones shenanigans occasionally occur, and a gig chaperoning the kids’ class excursion finds her having Meaningful Conversation with Mr. Wallaker, who seems to be a very nice guy. Maybe he’s a more viable candidate than the boy toy? DEAR DIARY, NO SPOILERS.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Bridget Jones franchise is kinda playing May-December catch-up after 2024 gave us The Idea of You, Babygirl and A Family Affair, although Fielding’s novel Mad About the Boy predates those movies by a decade.
Performance Worth Watching: Grant and Thompson steal scenes without a drop of shame while Ejiofor grounds his moments with the gentle seriousness the movie very much needs. Be grateful for their work, because Zellweger’s Jones persona is increasingly self-conscious, and Woodall barely registers beyond the shots of his shirtlessness.
Memorable Dialogue: Bridget drops Mabel off at school and gets zinged with extreme prejudice by a schoolkid, who asks Mabel, “Why is your granny wearing pajamas?”
Sex and Skin: A gauzy makeout scene and a bit of postcoital snuggling.
Our Take: It’s been a bit since the last Jones movie, so please help me refresh my memory: Have Zellweger’s performances always been this over-the-top goofy? She mugs and fidgets and wiggles and hops and squints and purses her lips and never ever stops signaling to us that Bridget is profoundly uncomfortable with the mere act of existing. Her characterization has either aged poorly or gotten increasingly wacky. It’s cartoonish and distracting and I wanted to slip Bridget some sleepytime weed gummies so she’d chill out, if only for a moment.
When the lead performance, which consumes every drop of the run time, calls so much attention to its own outlandishness, it’s difficult to connect to the heart of the character. Perhaps we all get a little weirder as we grow older, and less apologetic about it, but that’s an apologia I’m not willing to deliver on the movie’s behalf. Fans of the franchise may be more forgiving, and appreciate another opportunity to hang out with their endearingly uncouth heroine, to bask in the nostalgic warmth of time spent with a familiar character whose quirks and insecurities are painfully relatable. But I frequently found myself in revolt against Zellweger’s non-stop mannerisms, which tend to be more hyperbolic than the stereotypical rom-com situations the movie puts her in.
But let’s calmly walk around that tall, tall hurdle for a minute and examine what’s left. Mad About the Boy functions as a drop-in to see how Bridget’s doing these days, and finds her at the beginning of a post-grieving-process arc that ends up being lumpy, episodic and contrived to find her a new romantic interest. The comedy is a shade too hacky, a significant dilution of the series’ signature edginess, and its bromidic emotional content isn’t going to convert non-Jonesophiles. The screenplay throws in a go-nowhere subplot about Bridget’s perfect nanny and a brief, eminently cuttable appearance by Isla Fisher as a neighbor (am I swinging and missing on a bit of Bridget Jones inside baseball here?). You may find yourself wondering where this movie is going, at the same time it fails to dole out any surprises thematically or storywise. The first Bridget Jones was lightning in a bottle, a memorably zeitgeisty rom-com that broke a few rules and netted Zellweger an Oscar nom, and Mad About the Boy offers three-times-removed diminishing returns.
Our Call: Mad About the Boy has the air of being Bridget’s final flustery romantic foofaraw, but we had the same thought last time. It almost certainly should put a capper on this series, although the prospect of sitting through Bridget Jones VII and watching her stumble on a broken high heel while ogling a prospective hunk and tumble into her own grave doesn’t seem entirely unrealistic. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.