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Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason (Blu-ray)
Year: 2004
Rating: M
Cast: Jim Broadbent, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Gemma Jones, Renee Zellweger
Release Date: December 01, 2010
Distributor: Universal
The Film: 2.0
The Disc: 2.0
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5"... a colossal misfire."
The first film featuring Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger) was a charming, breezy confection. Something went awry, however, with the sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, which is a colossal misfire. Fundamentally, the problem lies with the filmmakers' treatment of Bridget. In the original film, her struggles with romance, vocation and her lifestyle were small scale, which made them universal. Having landed her dream partner, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), at the end of the first film, Bridget is summarily punished in the sequel, to ensure that she doesn't remain content for long.
Instead of aiming for empathy or sympathy, we're invited to laugh derisively as misfortune is piled on Bridget. After a parade of scenes that shamelessly insult our intelligence, the capper arrives with Bridget in a Thai gaol on drug smuggling charges. Only those who have bought into Bridget's humiliation wholesale will enjoy this baffling, incongruous scenario.
Zellweger tries hard to reignite the charm that she exuded in her first outing as Bridget, but it's a lost cause. Colin Firth and Hugh Grant are wasted; in a display of this film's desperation, they're launched into a retread of the previous film's famous fisticuffs, with diminishing returns.
Blu-ray punches up the image, as expected, but there's little worth writing about the film's visual style. The abundant extras (all from the DVD) include a host of featurettes, deleted scenes and a director's commentary, and are largely gushing and self-congratulatory.
