Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy review – giant laughs for Hugh Grant but weepie sequel is strangely dazed

The last Bridget Jones film – the second sequel, about Bridget having a baby – executed the daring athletic leap of jumping the shark and then jumping back. There were some tired novelties but, by virtue of its conscientiously maintained stream of likable gags, it leapt back into our hearts and BJ3 seemed a decent way to sign off the franchise and remember Helen Fielding’s inspired creation. But though I was willing myself to enjoy this fourth film, about the heroine’s adventure with a younger man, the Bridget Jones series has frankly run out of steam.

This is a fourquel in the same unhappy tradition as Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. The jokes have been dialled down to accommodate a contrived and unconvincingly mature “weepie” component but the film becomes sad in the wrong way. The actors are mostly going through the motions, there is so little chemistry between each of the two lead pairings they resemble a panda being forced to mate with a flamingo, and Renée Zellweger’s performance is starting to look eccentric.

There are one or two nice touches: an uproarious pastiche of the Levi’s swimmer TV ad gives us a Darcy 2.0 hunk in the water and showcases Dinah Washington’s performance of Mad About the Boy; there’s a nice gag about Bridget being asked by a young man at the till if she wants to complete her meal deal. Naturally Hugh Grant gets giant laughs, returning as the ageing, golden-hearted cad Daniel Cleaver. So does Emma Thompson, back as the down-to-earth gynaecologist from the previous film. But Bridget herself looks marooned and oddly dazed.

Those who don’t want to know what is revealed in the trailer’s opening moments had better look away now … but Bridget’s husband has died. Carrie Bradshaw’s Mr Big collapsed fatally and ignominiously on his Peloton, but human rights lawyer Mark Darcy has somehow nobly expired doing his good works in foreign parts and the movie doesn’t give us the details. Bridget is now left a widow living in a gorgeous house in Hampstead, north London, with two preteen children, Billy (Casper Knopf) – the “baby” from the last film – and Mabel (Mila Janković) who get babysat by their cool Uncle Daniel and go to a posh prep school, presided over by uptight yet fanciable science teacher Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

All of Bridget’s mates return in continuing laugh-free cameos, including Shazzer (Sally Phillips), Jude (Shirley Henderson), Tom (James Callis), Miranda (Sarah Solemani) and Talitha (Josette Simon). Bridget’s mum and dad, Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent, return too on a melancholy note and Celia Imrie is there so briefly she is almost subliminal.

After such a long time in brave misery, Bridget decides to revamp her life: she goes back to work as the world’s ditsiest TV producer and her friends urge her to get back in the dating scene. And so, on a thrillingly cradle-snatching basis, she ends her shag drought by hooking up on Tinder with Roxster, played by Leo Woodall, a sexy young park attendant at Hampstead Heath who gallantly rescues Bridget and her two kids when they get stuck up a tree.

So this age-inappropriate affair continues, and incidentally all these recent older-woman-younger-man movies such as Babygirl, A Family Affair and The Idea of You are surely just marking time while the French cinema industry finally plucks up the courage to tackle the grande affaire of Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron. And yet something else happens in Bridget’s love life when she volunteers to help out on a school excursion led by Mr Wallaker – what looks like a geographically startling weekend trip from London to the picturesque Lake District, for which the school minibus has perhaps been fitted with supersonic jet engines or a Star Trek matter transporter.

With the exception of Grant and Thompson, really all of the actors are phoning (or rather voice-noting) it in, though this is a function of the material. Zellweger looks as if she’s thinking about something else and Woodall has none of the charm and believable humanity he has showed us before – the scenes here on Hampstead Heath are an uneasy, inadvertent echo of his romantic One Day moments on Primrose Hill. Fans might prefer to remember the previous three films.