By now, the film has already become with the repetition of lines from the first film in which they did work, only here they are amped up, sometimes to disturbing effect: take Daniel Cleaver’s famed “hello mummy” mouthed to Bridget’s granny panties (this time the scene takes place in Thailand) is taken one step creepily further with Daniel, in the moment, muttering disgustingly between Bridget’s thighs, “Daddy’s home, oh yes he is… oh yes he is…” in the sort of voice you would use to speak to a puppy or an infant. The whole scene is just sleazy and gross and Bridget is saved with a hotel hooker hired by Cleaver shows up for her nightly visit (this disgusts her enough that she leaves – I’d have been gone long before then, but hey…)
It is exactly this sort of thing that just doesn’t work. The first film’s equivalent line (“Hello mummy!) when Cleaver saw said panties was just cheeky enough, but not over the top. Not so much that it actually disgusted the viewer. But this is typical of this film and is exactly what makes so much of it hard to fathom. The real strength of the first Bridget Jones film was its believability and authenticity. Here, both the writer, but more, the screenwriter or whomever did the adaptation, really took things too far, so that the original strength – that young women could identify – is now absent.
Consider that while in Thailand, Bridget’s friend Shazzer hooks up with a stranger named Jedd (actually, she meets him on the plane, they are reading the same book, thus insta-bond!). Jedd hangs around with Shazzer in Thailand, apparently shagging most of the tinme, while meanwhile Bridget does little work on her documentary (remember, that’s why she is there), while Cleaver works separately on his part, yet one afternoon after Bridget is unknowingly fed an omelet made of magic mushrooms and is in the ocean and hallucinating wildly, she just happens to be found by Daniel Cleaver who takes her backto his room and tries to shag her again, but doesn’t get his way since the above line seems to have creeped out Bridget as it does the rest of us. My point here is not to simply review the plot, but to show how utterly absurd and improbably the whole scene is. Whose life is this? And who can identify with this? Wave bye-bye to the thing that made Bridget Jones a great film.
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