Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy review – May just be the best one to date

But we’ve all grown up with Bridget. With Renée Zellweger back in the role, she’s now a mother-of-two, to the insular Billy and the mischievous Mabel. Moreover, she’s experienced profound tragedy.

When Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy begins, we swiftly learn that her husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) died four years earlier on a humanitarian mission in Sudan. She’s on her own again, relying on her ex-boss Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) to babysit as she heads to an excruciating dinner party where friends sympathise with her being a middle-aged widow.

But Mad About the Boy isn’t a film that wallows in the maudlin for too long. Reluctantly joining Tinder, Bridget enters the world of online romance, experiencing 'matches' and ghosting, and all the other things that go with dating apps.

She soon hooks up with a hunky horticulturist who goes by the name of Roxster (One Day’s Leo Woodall, looking very muscular and swoon-worthy).

Bridget dating a man 20 years her junior? There’s fun to be had there, especially when she arrives back at work – producing a Loose Women-like TV show – with unkempt hair after a first night of passion with her new man. His introduction to her mates – think wet T-shirts and canine chaos – is also priceless.

Brightly directed by incoming filmmaker Michael Morris (To Leslie), the well-crafted script from Fielding, Abi Morgan and Dan Mazer balances humour and poignancy, arguably in a way that the previous three movies never quite did.

Yes, there’s still some slapstick – Bridget pratfalling here and there – but Morris keeps that to a minimum. Instead, we get the terror of being middle-aged and witnessing your life being undone by over-zealous kids, perfect mothers at the school gates and – yes – choosing the right condoms in the chemist's.

No question, after 2016’s limp third outing, Bridget Jones’s Baby, this feels like the franchise is back on song. Whisper it quietly, but it may even be the best Bridget Jones movie to date – perhaps because both the characters and the returning cast are having a blast.

With Zellweger effortless once more in the central role, Grant is also on outrageous form as Cleaver, who – when he isn’t romancing poets/models – is still making "saucy" suggestions to "Bridge". Emma Thompson is witheringly good as our heroine’s gynaecologist and Colin Firth’s cameo appearance will, frankly, bring on the sniffles.

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With all the old favourites back too – from Bridget’s friends, including Shirley Henderson and Sally Phillips, to her father, played by Jim Broadbent – it’s as if absolutely nobody wanted to miss out.

While everyone gets their moment in the sun, newcomers including Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Billy’s science teacher, are seamlessly integrated into the tapestry.

And then there’s the cracking soundtrack, from The Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go to David Bowie’s Modern Love, which sees Bridget dancing up a storm.

With a story that spans sun-dappled summer to snowy winter, showing London at its most charming, this is a film that really knows when to deliver the emotional moments. One scene – involving the release of balloons to mark a significant birthday – is true lump-in-the-throat stuff in a story that maturely handles the difficulties of grief.

"Bridget Jones – it’s time to live," she narrates at one point. Well, on this evidence, she’s living her best life.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is released in UK cinemas on Thursday 13th February 2025.

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