The genius of novelist Helen Fielding's silly and compulsively readable Bridget Jones's Diary was Bridget herself. A neurotic charmer who eats, smokes, and drinks to excess, dates dreadful men, and then castigates herself in her diary, Bridget struck a chord with a generation of women convinced by self-help gurus that all their problems are the product of their own inadequacies. Sadly, in both Fielding's sequel and Beeban Kidron's fat-joke-filled follow-up to BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY, all Bridget's problems are her own fault.
Now united with upper-crust human-rights lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the intrepid Bridget is first seen skydiving bottom-first into a pigpen in the name of television journalism--the first of many cheap jokes at Bridget's expense. On the hopelessly bad advice of friends Shazzer (Sally Phillips), Jude (Shirley Henderson), and Tom (James Callis), Bridget eventually picks a relationship-souring fight over Mark's leggy associate (Jacinda Barrett) and soon after finds herself in Bangkok filming a segment of "The Smooth Report," a boorish travelogue hosted by sleazy ex-flame Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). Bridget gets arrested for smuggling cocaine and tossed into a hellish Thai prison, where she teaches her battered, drug-addicted cellmates to sing "Like a Virgin" and brings some sunshine into their lives with gifts of fancy bras, chocolate bars, and copies of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
There's more--much more--and it's all equally labored and dispiriting. Bridget has degenerated into a clingy, obsessive, lumpen caricature of her former sparkling self, so witless and galling that Lucy Ricardo seems a steady, self-confident font of common sense by comparison. Readers who fell in love with the original Bridget laughed along with her mishaps, but like the oily Daniel, Kidron's film is merely laughing at her. Read the complete review for Bridget Jones's Diary
