Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025) Review: Renée Zellweger’s Scene-Stealing Performance isn’t Enough to Overcome the Fourquel’s Laborious Finale
Remember Bridget Jones? Well, she’s back — older but not necessarily wiser in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Baby with Renée Zellweger reprising her iconic role that made her a star in the first place. To refresh your memory, the last time we saw Bridget Jones was nine years ago (!) in Bridget Jones’s Baby, where she married Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and had a baby boy named William a.k.a. Billy.
The pair have since raised their two children Billy (now played by Casper Knopf) and Mabel (Mila Jankovic) and life’s good until tragedy happens. We learn that Darcy was killed in Sudan and four years after his death, Bridget has fully committed to motherhood as she takes care of her children while occasionally remembering her late husband. Colin Firth reprises his role as Mark Darcy, but as a ghost of the past, where Bridget still sees him occasionally.
The earlier part of the movie does a good job of reflecting on Bridget’s current situation as a widow juggling between her motherhood and her middle-aged crisis of being single again. While she still swears like a sailor, she’s no longer the same bubbly Bridget as she used to be but rather an empty shell of her former self. She remains stuck in the same sad circle, refusing to move on but it’s just a matter of time before she decides “it’s time to live” as she writes in her diary.
Seeing her dancing and lip-syncing to David Bowie’s infectiously catchy “Modern Love” sure brings back the memory of how Bridget Jones used to embrace herself in the past. Her doctor friend, Rawlings (Emma Thompson, in a hilarious cameo appearance) even advises her to return to the workforce. And so Bridget did as she’s back as a television producer and what about her love life?
Well, there are two potential love interests: One is Billy’s new science teacher, Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and the other is a younger hunk of the titular “baby” named Roxster (Leo Woodall of TV’s The White Lotus) that Bridget immediately swoons over him from the day she meets him under the embarrassing circumstances. She later finds out he’s only 29-year-old but age is just a number for both of them since Roxster loves dating an older woman like Bridget.
In the tradition of an age-gap romance that becomes trendy these days with last year alone had been piling with movies like The Idea of You, A Family Affair and Babygirl, it is particularly a sexual re-awakening for Bridget. And here lies the problem with the movie’s subtitle, Mad About the Boy as the story doesn’t get to do much with the age-gap romance angle beyond the occasional flirting, sex and meet-cute moments between Bridget and Roxster.
The movie tends to drag in many places with the laborious 125-minute running time. Michael Morris, a newcomer to the Bridget Jones movie franchise, who mostly directed TV episodes like The Slap, 13 Reasons Why and Better Call Saul, does an okay job navigating Bridget’s personal life while bringing out the best in Renée Zellweger’s scene-stealing performance. She’s charming and likable as always and she gets reliable co-stars including Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall, despite the latter being sadly underutilised to a certain extent. Apart from Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant also returns with an equally solid supporting turn as Bridget’s former boss and lover Daniel Cleaver.
And yet, as much as I really wanted to like this movie, the erratic pacing is a turn-off and so does the over-reliance on the mawkish sentimentality that goes on and on. Instead of a great send-off to close off the chapter of the Bridget Jones franchise that the first three movies have done well, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy ends up as a half-baked attempt to recapture the nostalgia factor while struggling to find the right balance between the frothy rom-com tropes and the emotional-drama storytelling.
