When the fourth Bridget Jones movie was announced, we noted the movie was taking the Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again route, wherein Firth (a star of both movies, as it happens) would be written off as dead à la Meryl Streep’s character Donna. It turns out that prediction was doubly true, as the Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy trailer features a moment of ghostly reappearance of an older, distinguished Mark Darcy à la Meryl Streep in the Mamma Mia! sequel baptism scene.
But enough about Colin Firth! He’s a crucial character to the franchise, yes, but this is Bridget Jones’ movie, and Renée Zellweger has returned with her expertly calibrated clumsy British charm. In Mad About The Boy, we find our heroine four years widowed (after Mark “was killed on a humanitarian mission in the Sudan”) and raising two young children “with help from her loyal friends and even her former lover, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant),” according to the film’s synopsis. Everyone in Bridget’s life—down to her gynecologist (Emma Thompson)—is encouraging her to get back out there, so she gets on the apps and gets a new lease on life.
It wouldn’t be Bridget Jones without a love triangle, and now there are two new men to choose from: the “Tree Adonis,” a younger man played by Leo Woodall (White Lotus, One Day), and her son’s handsome science teacher played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Though Bridget is still battling grief and navigating single motherhood, at the end of the day she’s still the girl we fell in love with more than 20 years ago. Case in point, her emphatic declaration in front of an entire studio audience: “I had a full night of utterly mind-blowing sex, and it was amazing!”
Despite the fact that Bridget Jones is a commercially successful franchise, the fourth entry is going straight to streaming on Peacock in the U.S. on February 13. Apparently she does better overseas, so Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy will get an international theater release starting February 12.