WhatzUp

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
by Derek Neff

I won’t mince words: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is an unmitigated piece of crap, and under no circumstances should you waste your time watching it. Its predecessor, Bridget Jones’s Diary, was quite a bit of fun, but the sequel is nothing more than a lame attempt to cash in on the success of the first. All the actors from the first movie wasted no time in signing up for the sequel, and all I can say is that I hope they got paid well for their troubles - for with the damage this movie might (should?) cause to RenÈe Zellweger’s future credibility as an actress, she very well might need the money in years to come.

In the first movie, we sympathized with Bridget as she struggled to lose weight, find a fulfilling career and fend off embarrassment and misadventure at every turn. She was funny, and sympathetic and charming, and she had genuine problems that were immediately identifiable.

In the sequel, Jones has become a TV news correspondent who does things like skydive into pig sties in order to provide laughs for local TV newsmagazines. When the movie opens, she has been seeing nice-guy Mark (Colin Firth) for about two months now. Jones is happy with her new beau; she says the word “shagging” a lot, both as a way of showing how incredibly adult her relationship with Mark is and of establishing the fact that Bridget is British. (Zellweger’s faux-British accent sounds much less convincing than it did in the first movie, especially as the screenplay itself contains little else that seems authentically British.)

One slightly bright spot in all this mess is Hugh Grant, who struggles mightily to generate the same level of raffish charm he did in the first movie and who easily steals each scene in which he appears. However, the screenplay fails him here. He’s given little to do except function as a romantic foil to Mark, and his character comes off as much more two-dimensional and uninteresting than he was in Diary.

The movie is rated R, but only because the characters say the F-word a lot, the same way that kids on a playground cuss in order sound more adult and sophisticated than they really are. Profanity notwithstanding, the dialogue is as adolescent and un-insightful as anything currently on the Disney Channel. (I take that back: “Kim Possible” is actually pretty insightful in its own sly way.)

The movie apparently operates under the premise that we want nothing more than to see Bridget Jones cruelly humiliated, over and over and over, but the ways in which the sequel humiliates her are easily preventable and are predicated upon nothing much at all. In lieu of any other good ideas, director Beeban Kidron variously has Bridget skiing out of control down a steep slope, getting arrested and imprisoned in Thailand for smuggling drugs and being tricked into taking hallucinogenic mushrooms (hilarity ensues). With sadistic screenwriters like these, who needs enemies?