Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – A Fourquel Worth Falling For  

The fourth film in a franchise is often the point where things start to unravel. Whether it’s the clunky nostalgia grabs like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or the sluggish fatigue of Die Hard 4.0, returning to familiar territory often leads to diminishing and, frankly, disastrous returns. It’s such a relief to report that Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy doesn’t just avoid disaster—it’s the best Bridget Jones film since the original. In fact, it comes so close to capturing the goofy, heartfelt magic of Bridget Jones’s Diary that it feels like a return to the glory days of the very early aughts. 

Renée Zellweger returns as the ever-charming, ever-messy Bridget, now living in Hampstead with two young children and carrying the weight of immense loss. Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the ultimate love of her life, was killed four years ago on a humanitarian mission, leaving her to navigate single motherhood and a world that insists it’s time she “gets back out there.”  With Tinder, social media, and the looming threat of returning to work; Bridget must now figure out what’s important to her and carve a path forward through her grief. 

Director Michael Morris (To Leslie) and an incredibly sharp script from Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer, and Abi Morgan ensure that Bridget’s new reality is beautifully balanced between hilarity and heartbreak. The opening ten minutes alone – featuring an intervention from old friends Jude (Shirley Henderson) and Shazza (Sally Phillips), who deliver eyebrow-raising pep talks – set the tone perfectly. “If you don’t get laid, your vagina will literally reseal itself, it’s called Vaginal Adhesion,” Jude warns. Morris uses this to his advantage with an eye dropping sweeping one shot, showcasing flashes from her past, recounting the voices of the many characters from the previous three films. It is the ultimate love letter to the franchise without cramming too many storylines into the plot. 

What surprised me the most, is the fact that this is the saddest Bridget Jones movie by far. Firth’s ghostly appearances as Darcy could have felt heavy-handed but are handled with restraint, making them quietly devastating. Bridget is dealing with her grief while trying to guide her two children through it. In a world that wants her to move forward and get back out there, watching her take her Bridget approach is as entertaining and outrageous as you expect it to be. Meanwhile, Emma Thompson’s brilliantly played Doctor Rawlings and the ever-outrageously inappropriate Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) provide much-needed comic relief. There are scenes where the loss and grief get extremely overwhelming, and this helps it immensely. Grant steals every scene he’s in—now a little sadder, a little older, but still, somehow the Daniel Cleaver we all know and love. 

The plot follows familiar beats, and no one will be shocked by its romantic twists and turns. But the chemistry between Bridget and her two potential suitors – Leo Woodall’s much younger man, Roxster and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s reserved but dashing science teacher – keeps things engaging. But at the heart of it all is Zellweger. Whether fumbling through a kitchen disaster in front of her kids, battling her Netflix password, or simply trying to hold it all together, she reminds us why Bridget remains such an endearing and relatable character. It would have been easy to fall into the usual “single mum tropes” that movies tend to default to, it’s a credit to Fielding and the writers that they kept Bridget, well, Bridget.

Mad About the Boy swings from laugh-out-loud funny to genuinely gut-wrenching, sometimes in the same scene. But it never loses sight of its heroine’s resilience or the joy in her journey. A heartfelt, hilarious return for one of London’s most beloved fictional figures. If there were any doubts about the return of, and to, Ms Jones, Mad About the Boy squashes them all with its unrelenting charm.