8 Reasons You Won’t Want to Miss Bridget Jones’s Baby

Bridget is All Grown Up (Mostly)

The Bridget in Bridget Jones’s Baby is recognizable as the woman in the first two movies, down to her trademark heart necklace and her tendency towards saying the inappropriate thoughts that pop into her head. Which is just as it should be, because many of us relate to Bridget’s tumbles into awkwardness, job blunders, and tendency to overindulge.

But in this movie, there’s a maturity to how Renee Zellweger plays Bridget, a confidence about the way she moves in the world, the way she works, and even the way she speaks that wasn’t there in the first two films. If she’d been the Bridget of old, I’d still have watched her, laughing and cringing at her hilarious, accident-prone self, but things would’ve felt amiss. People do change with age, and characters should be no exception. Instead of polling her friends for life advice, Bridget makes her own decisions. After she discovers she’s pregnant but is unsure who the baby’s father is, she gestures to her stomach and tells the two men she’s been with, “The most important thing is this.”

This slightly more serious, sweeter tone took a bit to get used to, but once I did, I was all in. Even without Bridget being a complete hot mess like she often was in Bridget Jones’s Diary, she’s still that fun-loving character who’s going to lose a boot in the mud.

“Can’t make same mistakes,” she reflects early in the movie. “Must go forward and make new ones.” Which is Bridget in a nutshell.

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