Review of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) by Filipeneto — 02 Nov 2021

After the success of the first movie, the sequel was something we knew was going to happen, and it wasn't going to be as good or as fresh as it turned out. The film includes the core cast and crew of the first film and achieves an interesting and pleasing sense of narrative continuity, but the fun, freshness, lightness and creativity of the first film are largely absent from this sequel, which it is limited, in part, to following up on its story and reusing a formula that has worked well.

In this movie, Bridget and Darcy are finally together and happy... until her doubts about his faithfulness (obviously fueled by her friends, who in these things are excellent for putting fuel to the fire) lead to successive conflicts. However, her career and her life are undergoing changes, with an approach to her ex-boyfriend, Daniel, who will try to seize the opportunity to get back into her relationship with her rival. It's a reasonably well-written story, if we discard the more imaginative elements, like the protagonist's passage through prison in a foreign country (for me, it was the most forgettable moment in the plot). The humor is still there, but it's not as effective and the film is lukewarm.

As far as the cast is concerned, we have nothing new: again, Renee Zellwegger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth are once again the stars of a cast full of familiar faces. The three are perfectly at ease with the characters and do a very good job, in an overall assessment, but I didn't notice much evolution in any of them. They limited themselves to re-editing what they had already done. More interesting is the way Gemma Jones handled the challenges her character brought her this time around, as she was the central figure in one of the film's most important sub-plots.

Technically, the film has very similar production values and visual style to its direct predecessor. Very British in its style, it's visually unpretentious but elegant and has good editing and good filming locations, sets and costumes. The soundtrack is nothing particularly remarkable.