Far beyond the edge of reason: Does ‘Bridget Jones 4’ serve any purpose?

Bridget was once a relatable breath of fresh air, but the time has come to lay her escapades to rest

SLOUGH, ENGLAND:

Are you brave enough to peer down the bottomless pit of cash-grab sequels popping out of Hollywood? Then kick aside the detritus of Joker 2 and Inside Out 2 and make way for Mad About The Boy, also known as Bridget Jones 4. 

Based on the 2013 novel of the same name, come February next year, Renée Zellweger will be back as the chaotic Bridget, alongside Hugh Grant as the abominable Daniel Cleaver. She who can do no wrong, Emma Thompson - who played Bridget’s obstetrician in the third Bridget film - is also slated for a return as series author Helen Fielding whips up a script for yet another weary addition to the franchise. 

For those who indulge in the on-screen activities of Britain’s most ditzy blonde just to have a chance to ogle at Colin Firth, prepare for abject disappointment. He will not be joining anyone on this joyride. Fated though he may be to play a Darcy in some form or another, Firth’s character and Bridget’s true love, Mark Darcy, has been definitively disposed of via a landmine in Sudan. If you are looking for someone to blame, look no further than Fielding, who conjured up this tragic landmine-based incident to avoid her heroine becoming a “smug married”. (It appears that the only surefire way to escape such a dreadful fate is to involve a faraway landmine, rather than to avoid engaging in wedded bliss in the first place.) Is there any point, then, in exploring Bridget’s life any further? 

The short answer is, no. This is a sequel. There is rarely any good reason for one. If, however, your definition of a “point” is “mindless escapism” then by all means strap in. 

A quick recap

Based on the world’s original chick-lit, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (it is no coincidence that Bridget’s hero’s surname is Darcy, or that he is played by Firth), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) was a breath of fresh air. Zellweger fooled everyone into believing she really was English as Bridget stumbled through her life trying to lose weight, fall in love, keep a job, and generally careen from one disaster to another. In any land containing women, there would be someone who would find her struggles relatable, regardless of cultural background.

For a start, here was a heroine who did not have ballerina legs. I cannot stress this point enough. I have endured enough chick-lit to know that when Bridget Jones’s Diary was published in 1996, it was almost mandatory for all rom-com heroines to possess the body shape of ballerinas, even if the text showed that they had the workout habits of a nesting pigeon. To see both the book and the film version of Bridget look like an actual person, therefore, was almost more gratifying than seeing Firth roped into playing a Darcy. 

Not only does Bridget assume the relatable bodily proportions of an average woman, she also craves the presence of a special someone in her life, swinging between the rakish but vile Daniel Cleaver and the sensible but stodgy Mark Darcy. Her approach to life may be somewhat unorthodox, but there will be enough Pakistani ladies burned by the rishta process to at least get an inkling into Bridget’s desire to be chosen by a man, however uncool such a notion may sound. So far, so good. 

A series of sequels

Tread with caution, for here lie spoilers galore. The second film, Edge of Reason (2004), based loosely on yet another Austen novel, Persuasion, sees Bridget’s chaotic life take her further afield to Thailand. Here she learns that Daniel is as much of an empty-headed womaniser as he ever was. Still reeling from this unsettling (but rather obvious) discovery, Bridget ends up being inadvertently imprisoned. During her stint in a Thai jail, Bridget somehow finds the will to serenade her fellow inmates with a rousing rendition of Madonna’s Like A Virgin. For added entertainment, Mark and Daniel end up fighting like a pair of testosterone-fuelled schoolboys. Entertaining, certainly. But does it pack the relatable punch of the first film? No. 

The third film, Bridget Jones’s Baby, finds Bridget in the enviable situation where she has both Mark and Jack (played by none other than TV’s dreamiest doctor, Patrick Dempsey) fighting for her affections. Daniel is presumed dead in a plane crash, but as is common with fictional plane crash victims, he turns up very much alive by the end of the film. Entertaining, but inevitably, pointless. 

Back to the present

The fourth film will see Bridget navigating her fifties minus a husband as she grapples with loss, motherhood, dating apps and “reuniting with an old flame”, who, according to the balance of probability, must surely be none other than Daniel. 

“So we didn’t have a 60-year-old Daniel Cleaver wandering around looking at young girls. I made up a good interim story for him,” said Grant as he appeared on the Graham Norton Show. At this stage, we do not know just what this good interim story consists of, nor how closely the film will follow the book. Whatever path it takes, Grant is convinced we will not be disappointed. “It is a good and moving script,” he said. “It is extremely funny but very sad.”

Regardless of how funny or sad it may be, however, there are those who feel that nothing encapsulates the term “flogging a dead horse” better than the Bridget Jones series. “When I heard the news that a fourth instalment of Bridget Jones was due to start filming this spring, my first thought was: oh, dear God, please no more,” writes Emily Bootle for iNews. “Bridget made so many of us who we are – and that means not only that we don’t want her to change, but that her shenanigans are no longer revolutionary.”

Chick-lit lovers in my own reading circle feel the same way. “Bridget was great when we were younger, but now it is something I would only watch when I’m brain dead,” confesses Sudashni Sayana, whose Bridget days are numbered.

A wise book editor once told me that audiences are not interested in real life. They want high-octane drama that pings off in a wildly different direction to real life. Sometimes, however, that direction is so far off into the horizon that it is nothing but a vanishing dot. Bridget may not quite deserve the landmine that finished off her beloved Mark, but perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if she took up crocheting far away from the screen to spin out the rest of her days. 

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