Bridget Jones's Baby

 This review was first published by The Student Pocket Guide

Many people will have had a Bridget Jones moment. You know, when you end up sitting at home on a Friday night, all alone, bucket-sized glass of wine in-hand and singing/sobbing along to “All By Myself”. Since her big-screen debut back in 2001, Miss Jones has become something of a cultural icon – symbolising the ultimate thirty-something, middle-class woman with a disastrous love-life and a keen appreciation for alcohol. 

The success of the character – and the chord it struck with millions – is largely down to Renée Zellweger, whose easy on-screen charm and warmth endeared Bridget to audiences the world over. Perhaps the ultimate testament to her performance is the fact the hostility which greeted news of an American being cast as the British Bridget was soon forgotten. After the success of Bridget Jones’s Diary, a second film followed and now, a third has just hit cinemas. And what fun it is!

As with any comedy, Bridget Jones’s Baby would live or die by its script. After the tonally-misjudged Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (which, bizarrely, saw action zip across to a Thai prison), the humour in the latest film is, thankfully, consistently funny, and some of the jokes are laugh-out-loud hysterical. We join Bridget spending the evening of her forty-third birthday alone in her flat with her love life in tatters after breaking up with the love of her life, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Her career as a cable news producer, on the other hand, is going great-guns and, keen to reinvigorate Bridget’s personal life, one of her colleagues invites her to a music festival for a bit of glamping. 

A key component of this trip is, of course, getting Bridget to interact with members of the opposite sex – quite a feat when she ends up falling face-first into the festival mud. A knight in shining armour in the form of billionaire Jack Qwant (played by Patrick Dempsey) is on hand, however, to pluck Bridget from her floundering, and the pair end up sharing his yurt in a night of passion. A few weeks later, Bridget ends up falling into bed with her old flame, the emotionally reserved Mr Darcy and, as the film’s title would suggest, becomes pregnant. The only thing is, she doesn’t know if the child’s father is old-flame Darcy or newer-flame Qwant. 

Much of the comedy stems from her concealing this fact, confessing to it and dealing with the subsequent fall-out. The screenplay was originally written by creator Helen Fielding and Dan Mazer, and national treasure Emma Thompson was then brought in to help with a re-write. The result (for the most part) is lean and witty, only faltering in the third act when exploring Qwant and Darcy’s fractious relationship. Old characters make a welcome return, including Bridget’s parents played by Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones. Her mother, this time, is running for “high office” in the local parish council and, on Bridget’s advice, updates her political campaign to better reflect modern Britain and represent “the majority of homosexuals”. 

Renée Zellweger must take much of the credit for the film’s success, anchoring the rather contrived plot with a credibility and geniality which is very engaging. Sharon Maguire (who directed the first film) returns to direct again, and her skill is evident throughout. Emma Thompson has given herself a part as Bridget’s no-nonsense gynaecologist and creates many laughs, especially when warning Qwant and Darcy that witnessing Bridget in labour might not be a wise idea: “my ex-husband said it was like watching his favourite pub burn down”. This being a Bridget Jones film, there’s a lot of sexual humour and swearing, but it always stays on the right side of the line and seeing Bridget in her work environment, complete with hipster boss, also creates plenty of new laughs. 

With old and new characters alike, the supporting cast bounces off one another and Zellweger, Firth and Dempsey do well to handle the humour, with moments of slapstick comedy which culminate in an in-labour Bridget being man-handled through a revolving door. All the rom-com requirements are hit and never feel laboured (if you’ll pardon the pun).

Bridget Jones’s Baby ditches the high-jinks of the previous film and is a warm return to the characters and humour which fans will love. As the voice of Ellie Goulding rings across the closing credits, you’re left with a sense of immense satisfaction. Satisfied that Bridget might have everything worked out; satisfied that the comedy was very funny; and satisfied that no matter the current state of your love life, if Bridget can make it, so can you. 

Rating: * * * *

The Mechanic: Resurrection

This review was first published by The Student Pocket Guide

Hollywood action films are often hit by narrative famine. That is, they suffer a lack of decent story which results in a film which wastes away, leaving only a bare skeleton of action sequences with little coherence and even less impact.

Indeed, it would appear that Mechanic: Resurrection neglected to spend its budget on competent script writers, choosing instead to splash out on exotic locations for Jason Statham to run around and look generally menacing. Whether its Jason scaling Sydney skyscrapers or breaking into high-security South East Asian prisons, the action sequences are dramatic to watch, but without the underpinnings of an engaging plot, things never hang together. 

A few years ago, Jason Statham became Arthur Bishop, an elite assassin and the titular character in The Mechanic, enhancing the very recognisable brand of tough-guy action hero which he firmly established in the Transporter series. A blend of Ethan Hunt, James Bond, Jack Reacher and Jason Bourne, Arthur Bishop’s talents lie in the ingenuity of his kills and his ability to go (largely) undetected during the process. 

In Mechanic: Resurrection, we find him in retirement, living a low-key life in Brazil which is rudely disrupted by a mysterious woman who tasks him with killing five people for her mysterious boss. The ensuing scenes establish a link with Bishop’s past and he finds himself zipping around the world to assassinate three arms dealers in order to save his new beau (played by Jessica Alba). 

Naturally, any sense of plausibility in films such as this goes out of the window, and the film’s messy plot is as believable as Team Brexit’s NHS claims. Coupled with the ridiculous narrative is the catastrophically awful dialogue which follows every action film cliché, right from Statham and Alba’s predictable relationship, to stereotypical bad-guy mutterings. Alba’s character, too, does little for gender politics, spending most of the film waiting around to be rescued by Statham.   

Despite Statham’s very watchable on-screen performance (and type casting which was very successfully exploited in the Melissa McCarthy comedy Spy), the special effects look like they were done about ten years ago, exemplified by a cable car fight sequence during the film’s opening which raised a few laughs in the audience – hardly the effect desired by director Dennis Gansel, I should think. Stiff dialogue and some very clunky mobile phone product placement only added to the general soulless feeling of the film.

The action zips around the globe, culminating in an encounter with Tommy Lee Jones as an eccentric arms dealer (complete with pink-tinted glasses and an Elton John sense of style) and the narrative even strays into moral questions surrounding arms dealing. Such discussion, however, is even more superficial than a Kardashian’s Instagram account, and things soon return to Statham shooting and punching his way around the superyacht of bad-guy Crain (played by Sam Hazeldine).

All in all, Mechanic: Resurrection satisfies the action blockbuster tick boxes of “wildly outrageous stunts”, “exotic locations” and “high body count” but, on all other levels, it fails with its lacklustre and erratic approach to plot or meaningful characters. Whilst Jason Statham does again prove that he’s a reliable action hero, shots of his chiselled torso strolling along a Thai beach don’t compensate for the awfully predictable script or the poorly-realised special effects. At its best, Mechanic: Resurrection is a diversionary 90 minutes with occasional moments of excitement. At its worst, it represents an underwhelming, rather cynical, corporate exercise in action film-making.

Clapperboard Rating: * *

Jason Bourne

The two Bs: Bourne and Bond. The most successful screen spies of all time, and important influences on one another. The gritty realism of the Bourne films arguably shaped Daniel Craig’s run as 007, and Matt Damon has returned to the franchise, again teaming up with Paul Greengrass who directed the first three Bourne films, the first of which appeared in cinemas way back in 2002. After a brief hiatus which saw Jeremey Renner take over the reins in the spin-off The Bourne Legacy, Matt Damon charges back into the action and makes for an exhilarating, if not entirely meaningful, blockbuster…

In the manner of an extended episode of Who Do Think You Are (just with fewer historians and more explosions), it has taken Jason Bourne quite a while to discover his true identity. Jason Bourne sees the agent everyone wants to kill living a quiet, if not relaxing, existence on the Greek-Albanian border and passing the time by bare-knuckle fighting the local tough men. But when Nicky Parsons (a return to the role by Julia Stiles) manages to hack into the CIA’s database and steal files about a new, highly-classified agent recruitment programme, she gives Bourne the chance to find out more about his past and uncover the truth behind his father’s death. 

Predictably, the CIA are not too happy about this, and cyber division chief Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) is tasked by the CIA Director (played in gravelly tones by Tommy Lee Jones) to stop the hack and neutralise Parsons and Bourne. Things don’t go to plan, of course, and Bourne escapes, even with the CIA’s best assassin on his heels (a suitably persistent Vincent Cassel). From the outset, it’s clear that the action is going to be viscerally sharp, with a particularly well-filmed sequence seeing protestors attacking riot police on the streets of Athens. 

Jason Bourne – and the action – zips around Europe as if on a Contiki tour, and some brilliant set pieces in Berlin and London culminate in a jaw-dropping (but ridiculous) car chase through the streets of Las Vegas. Greengrass and director of photography Barry Ackroyd certainly know how to move a camera, jumping around and through the action with an intense, but precise sense of tension. Forty-five-year-old Matt Damon is on top form as ever, getting stuck in to neutralising his enemies and, in a heart-stopping moment, throwing himself off a building. Although Damon’s performance is refined and compelling, he has little dialogue in the film, quite the opposite from the wise-cracking botanist he played in The Martian. 

There’s a clear attempt to bring the Bourne franchise right up-to-date (Damon’s most recent outing in the role was nearly ten years ago!), and the narrative incorporates a sub-plot featuring Riz Ahmed as a Mark Zuckerberg-esque Silicon Valley techie about to launch a new, consumer data-driven enterprise. It becomes clear that he’s had some murky dealings with the CIA and is dangerously implicated in the hunt for Bourne. The CIA, usually the good guys controlling things from high-tech control centres, are now the morally-questionable aggressors in the game of hero Bourne vs. the State – the series’ hallmark. 

It’s an interesting discussion of the era of big data, big government and the rise of social media, but it never really gels with the overall plot which, as a whole, barely advances Bourne’s story any further than we got in Ultimatum. The thing which made the previous Damon Bourne films such a success was the strong scaffolding of the plot which supported the action. In Bourne 5, however, this narrative structure is a little more flimsy. 

Tommy Lee Jones puts in a great performance as the determined CIA Director, intent on bringing Bourne down, whatever the cost. His chiselled face and gruff manner plays in perfect counterpoint to Alicia Vikander, who is fast becoming one of the most exciting actresses in Hollywood. With her own agenda for bringing Bourne in, and an unfaltering belief in herself, Vikander’s character is an engaging and important development in the male-dominated world of the Bourne films. 

Matt Damon has really grown into the role which assured his A-list status, and audiences will be really pleased to see him return in Jason Bourne. The film is characterised by some superb performances (especially from Vikander) and some bold, trademark Bourne action. The pace is relentless, and the end result largely satisfying. Will there be a Bourne 6? That’s a certainty. 

Clapperboard Rating: * * * *