"Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason"

Yes, Renee Zellweger looks like a pathetic porker in this sequel to "Bridget Jones's Diary," but it's not her fault.

By Charles Taylor

Nov. 12, 2004 |

Hugh Grant trots through "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" -- too well groomed to be a stray, too raffish to be a purebred -- with the confidence of a stud dog naughtily wagging his equipment at all the available lady pooches.

The first Bridget Jones movie had the same effect on Grant's screen persona as a last-minute reprieve for a dog on his way to being spayed -- it saved him from turning forever into a stammering neuter. And it did so by allowing Grant to find his inner cad. Grant succeeded in the role of the arrogant, charming and wholly untrustworthy cocksman Daniel Cleaver, as he does here, by being just a bit more raunchy than you expected him to be. He played Daniel as the type of guy that all common sense should tell you was bad news but who you couldn't help enjoying anyway. He was an irresistible shit.

In this outing, Daniel has moved from publishing to junk TV. He's the host of a show that attempts to make culture cool for the lads-mag set. The device gives Grant a chance to get off some zingers (particularly one directed at the wildly overrated painter John Currin), and he delivers them with dirty-minded aplomb. He's childishly, unreasonably funny.

At the end of "Bridget Jones's Diary" Renée Zellweger's Bridget threw over Daniel for Colin Firth's Mark Darcy, the dependable, considerate human-rights lawyer who loved her. The purpose of bringing back Grant's Daniel is to toss a wrench into the machinery of true love and make Bridget wonder if she's made the right choice. It's a measure of how off this sequel is that we wind up wondering the same thing.

For a bad movie, "Bridget Jones's Diary" lingered in the memory pleasantly. It was thrown together, had no style and was often broad enough to make you cringe. But there were enough real laughs to compensate for that broadness -- and despite the reputation Helen Fielding's novel had gotten as a whiner's lament, the picture didn't wallow in self-pity and had a good streak of disreputability. It was what used to be called racy.

"Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" is so clumsy and crass that it makes you doubt the pleasure of the first movie. Could it actually have been as bad as this? The self-pity the first movie avoided is in full flower here. And the picture also indulges in something the first "Bridget Jones" didn't: humiliating its heroine.

Zellweger's Bridget got into her fair share of embarrassing situations in "Diary," but the director of that film, Sharon Maguire, didn't treat her cruelly. From the get-go, the director of this picture, Beeban Kidron, does. In the opening scene, Bridget, on assignment for her TV reporter's job, sky-dives and lands in a vat of pig manure. When her cameraman is instructed to "zoom in on the sow," we're treated to a close-up of the seat of Bridget's excrement-smeared jumpsuit. That pretty much sets the tone for what follows. If there's a way to make Bridget look physically foolish, the filmmakers find it.

Anyone who wants to make the claim that women are more sensitive to female beauty than men, from here on out is going to have to contend with Beeban Kidron. Kidron shows not a trace of feeling or sensitivity to the women in front of her camera.

Next page: The 25 pounds Zellweger added for the first movie made her look luscious