Review of "Bridget Jones's Baby"

This is exactly what you'd expect - some slapstick, some relationship humour, a lot of stuff about being a singleton woman struggling to control weight and meet Mr Right...but as long as you're not expecting Proust there are some laughs, and it's nice to look at. Almost too nice - this is Richard Curtis London, not the real one where people actually live. Bridget is still in her flat that's literally a stone's throw from Borough Market, but she can still walk in heels to Ealing where Mr Darcy allegedly lives, a route that seems to include several illuminated Thames bridges. The NHS hospital where she goes to be treated by Helen Mirren, her consultant, is beautiful, clean and mainly empty, and the consultant is available when she goes in to labour in the middle of the night.

A couple of other things I noticed; most of the time Bridget is a soppy cow whose stupidity and clumsiness provide many of the jokes. But we get a few looks at her bookshelf which suggest otherwise. When she quits her news-producer job, saying that perhaps one day integrity will be back in fashion, she goes home and we see a John Pilger book in the right hand side of the frame. Earlier there were a few old Penguin books around, of the kind not chosen for the cover picture.

Also one of the themes is that true love defies algorithms that could be used to predict which matches will and won't succeed. Mr Darcy's rival is a cerebral American billionaire who  has used his knowledge of mathematics to create a fact-based, science-based dating site. But Bridget ends up choosing Mr Darcy  - a nod to the 'anti-expert' and 'post-factual' zeitgeist, perhaps. Incidentally she's almost certainly wrong in doing this; Mr Darcy has shown himself to be cold and distracted through several movies, whereas the American is genuinely engaged and loves her just as much.

Watched at the Everyman Cinema in Muswell Hill.