REVIEW: Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy - very nearly perfect, just the way it is...

It’s just a bit nerve-racking wandering into Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy.

Bridget Jones 1 (can it really be nearly a quarter of a century ago?) was brilliant, fabulously new, crude and hilarious: Bridget Jones 2 was a rank disappointment, lurching depressingly between the so-so and the dire: Bridget Jones 3 was a vast improvement but still several leagues behind Bridget Jones 1.

So what on earth were we going to get with Bridget 4? The answer, thank goodness and what a relief, is a delight, a film very, very nearly perfect… just the way it is. It’s at least as good as the first one, but actually possibly even better. So much is very, very similar and yet so much is very, very different. There is a new and totally unexpected profundity here, a genuine poignancy we’ve really not had before. Without diluting the laughs over much, it’s a film which manages to say things both meaningful and memorable about the passage of time and about the nature of grief – and the way that we cope with it just because we have to.

At first it seems a simple plot twist that Mark Darcy has been killed off, doing what he does best, humanitarian work somewhere a long way away. And at first it seems a bit mawkish when he turns up a couple of times from beyond the grave just when Bridget is thinking about him most.

But as the film develops, it’s a film that goes places the franchise has never ever been before – and does so pitch-perfectly. Who’d have thought that you’d be… ahem… dabbing at your eye at a Bridget Jones movie? There’s a beautiful moment at a school show.

Alongside it all, Bridget – Renée Zellweger with the full range of Bridge mannerisms – is essentially still Bridget, singleton just as she was at the start, but this time a widow with two gorgeous children in tow, a reserved son (Casper Knopf), the image of his late dad Darcy and the sweetest daughter (Mila Jankovic, reminiscent of the girls in The Holiday) the image of Bridget – as Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) so helpfully points out. Yep, he’s back too – and brilliant. And he too gets a bit profound when his ticker briefly lets him down, a scene which incidentally also gives us the movie’s best line. Wait for the one about the hospital gown.

We start with Bridget in grief-stricken freefall, her cooking as disastrous as ever, leaving you wondering how on earth she’s made it this far without burning the house down. And then it’s familiar territory again – the ghastly couples dinner party a couple of decades on, then back with the gaggle of friends a couple of decades on. Time and again, the film refers back to the franchise’s past – and again does so cleverly and beautifully.

And that’s when, as she has done before, Bridget resolves to take the bull by the horns and get out there. And out comes the diary, the lip-synching and all the stuff of old. Before long she’s found herself a toyboy (Leo Woodal) with all the excitement that comes with that. But you sense something rather more interesting is simmering in the background with the uptight, whistleblowing schoolteacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) at her children’s school. Once again, as always, we’ve got Bridget somewhere between two sharply-contrasting men of sharply-varying degrees of suitability. And there’s lovely fun to be had watching her chart her course through it all, older for sure, but possibly not a lot more mature – and with the whole thing given so much more depth and interest by the appalling sadness forever in the background. It’s a film so good that you have to hope that Bridget Jones 4 really will be the final instalment.