I went to see Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason the other day. It was a romantic comedy with Hugh Grant in it. If for some reason there was a bookie following me around, offering bets on my life, he wouldn’t have touched this one. Tom likes romantic comedies with Hugh Grant in them, made by Working Title films.[ftn] And yet… The Edge of Reason was rather dull, irregularly funny, and contained an overwhelming aura of pointlessness.

As I was leaving the cinema, I found myself desperately trying to work out what it was that I enjoyed about romantic comedies. It must be something to do with the cute girl and cute guy getting together. In this film they start off together, so first you have to watch them split up, which is irritating as you know that they’ll just fix things up again in, ooooh, sixty more minutes. So it’s not so much sexual tension as sexual slack, which is a shame.

Is there something else I like about these films? The wit, of course. The Edge of Reason is a shade short on wit. There’s a bit of it, Grant gets most of it, but in general things are pretty sparse. Whole scenes go by with nothing more to keep them afloat than our supposed concern for Bridget’s well-being. Which is unfortunate as the movie invests a lot of time early on showing us how irritatingly stupid Jones is. If you though Ally McBeal was dumb, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet — though in fairness Mark Darcy has his stupid moments too.

Surprise is a big part of comedy as well, so it’s a shame this film desperately tries to use all the same jokes that the first one did.[ftn] Bridget’s bottom slamming into a camera? Check. Darcy and Cleaver getting into a fight? Check. The list goes on — or rather, it would if I could be bothered. Unfortunately, despite a series of replicated events from the first film, this movie ends up being far less. Bridget Jones’ Diary at least had a few subplots; no such beasts exist here. Bridget’s parents renew their wedding vows, but this isn’t so much a subplot as scenery. Given the touching performance Jim Broadbent gave as Bridget’s dad in the first film, it’s a shame he gets almost nothing to do here. And some of the things I would have liked more of from the first film, such as the cute integration with Bridget’s diary, and her handwriting on the screen, are completely absent.

Let me now move briefly to the subject of friends. It seems a staple of (bad) romantic comedies to have one, or many, friends who give the protagonist awful advice. This presumably comes about because the writer is desperate to work out why their theoretically sensible character would screw up their life to the point where it got funny. And so it is in this film too — why would Bridget break up with Mark? Hmmm. Let’s have the friends feed her a steady stream of bullshit. Brilliant! Even Bridget comments that her friends seem to spend all their time trying to set her up, then trying to break her up again. She’s this close to working out that she’s a character in a crummy film.

One of the painfully few points of interest in the film is that it slides in a plot strand from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that didn’t get used in the first movie; Darcy doing something above and beyond the call of duty, but not taking credit for it. Of course, this cute little reference is sullied by its association to the Thai prison section of the film. I bet you thought getting busted for smuggling drugs and almost sentenced to life imprisonment was a horrible fate that ruins lives. Well, it can also be life-affirming, as this film shows. I wouldn’t mind so much, but the film has a shocking lack of interest in the lives of the incarcerated Thai women that Bridget meets. Perhaps I’m being a bit stodgy here, but I feel that if you’re going to drop such things in a romantic comedy, you’ve got to put a shade more depth in than just reminiscing about bad boyfriends.

When criticising this film, it’s hard to know who to address. The Edge of Reason is of course, based on a book — and from the looks of things, not a very good one. Perhaps Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis and the rest had nothing to work with. Still, I’m shocked and disappointed. Working Title haven’t served me this kind of crap before. I feel like my trust has been violated. v. v. disappointing.[ftn]

Footnotes

1. I have to put that qualifier in, as Two Weeks’ Notice was pretty lame.
2. Rather reminiscent of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
3. And you thought I had the strength to avoid a ‘v.’ joke. Alright, no you didn’t, and you were right.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Wednesday, December 1st, 2004. It concerns such pressing issues as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.