Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004)

Miramax Films presents a Beeban Kidron film, starring Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth and Hugh Grant. Written by Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis, Adam Brooks and Helen Fielding. 108m. R for language and some sexual content.

1 star

I didn’t use to hate Bridget Jones.

She wasn’t exactly my type: a bundle of neuroses, a little too plump for her height, smoker. But I tolerated her - when she embarrassed herself in public or made a bad choice in who she slept with.

But in her second feature film - which is more apropos to a remake - I’ve tired of her.

Now she is my enemy.

Jones (Renee Zellweger) is like that friend who you love dearly, but you’d just wish they’d take your good advice once in a while. After countless promises to reform, one day you decide to cut your losses and go home.

I’m happy to say: Today is that day.

After successfully courting the near-perfect Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) in the first feature, “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Jones is engaged in a charming new life that is running completely incident-free. But after she meets Mark’s beautifully leggy intern, Rebecca (Jacinda Barrett), she allows her mind to be poisoned by her single and desperately lonely friends.

This starts an unendingly wretched series of events that encompasses a potential re-engagement with slimy beau Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), a pregnancy scare, a run-in with Thais, a silly catfight and the all-too-predictable marriage proposal.
Zellweger, who looks uncomfortably fat in this second appropriation of a Helen Fielding novel, delivers a quite wooden performance. Ditto to Colin Firth and Hugh Grant, but perhaps for different reasons. Firth’s Darcy is still too emotionally frigid to be truly likable while Grant acts decidedly bored of being an archetype, often reverting to his tried-and-trueisms that sometime descend into bad parody.

While the Darcys of both the “Bridget Jones” saga and the original source material, “Pride and Prejudice,” are known for their initial inability to appropriately express their feelings, nobody expects Darcy to remain such a cold fish after spending a couple of nights in the Elizabeth Bennet/Bridget Jones bed.

But it’s as much Darcy’s inattentive nature as it is Jones’ unsubstantiated paranoia that drives the fledgling journalist to accept an offer to team up with her old flame, Cleaver, in Thailand. And this begins a series of wrongheaded decisions that poisons the enjoyment of this film.

Despite my attempts to forgive Jones for her completely inaccurate assessment of the attraction between Darcy and intern, she compounds her mistake by taking up lodgings with the decidedly sex-hungry Clever. The Darcy-Jones relationship already seems to be on tenuous ground because of a lot of trust issues, so I can’t imagine the perception of sleeping with Clever helping things.

Finally, after I’ve truly blamed Jones for the destruction of the relationship, she’s hauled into a Thai prison on suspicion of drug trafficking (think “Midnight Express” or “Brokedown Palace”). That’s where the film obstinately makes its viewer watch a 20-minute tangent before it gives us the ending we could have predicted before we sat in our seats. I know it’s getting harder to be original these days, but couldn’t the four writers involved think of any better way for Darcy to demonstrate his love than to spring his girlfriend out of a notoriously stringent prison system?

It’s perhaps in recognition of this wrongheadedness that audiences are given a highly choreographed fight sequence between Darcy and Clever as a humorous respite afterwards. This is supposed to be a comedy, despite all the uncomfortable relationship peril that has transpired.

With the inevitable marriage of Darcy and Jones at the end of “The Edge of Reason,” I can only suppose the producers will continue to throw Bridget Jones movies at the populace until the masses revolt.

I just hope I’m allowed to lead the charge next time.