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‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ Review: Renée Zellweger Charms in What Feels Like a Sweetly Romantic but Mild Finale
Renée Zellweger charms, but even Bridget's fling with a younger dude doesn't generate much madness.
The romantic liaison of the title takes place between Bridget, now in her early 50s, and a 29-year-old dreamboat biologist named Roxster (Leo Woodall) — and this, too, is an attempt to make the film au courant, since the real news about this May-December fling is how casual and “Why not?” it seems. “Mad About the Boy” is about how Bridget lurches herself out of her grief to rejoin the world, a journey that starts with the ebullient opening-credits sequence, in which she jumps up and down on the bed with her kids and lip-syncs to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Roxster, played as a sensitive Adonis by Leo Woodall (from “The White Lotus”), jump-starts her libido with no problem, and the two get along nicely. Or Bridget’s decision, based on advice from the redoubtable Dr. Rawlings (a whiplash-sharp Emma Thompson), to return to work, signing on as the producer of a talk show called “Better Women.” The morning after she first sleeps with Roxster, she comes into the studio with tousled hair and a dazed look, and one colleague after another asks, “Did you have sex last night?” When she finally confesses, in a fulsome outpouring of vintage Bridget TMI, it turns out that the entire studio audience has witnessed her speech (they break into applause).
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