To add to the disaster, it turns out that Jedd, surprise surprise is not such a nice guy after all and has given Shazzer a “snake fertility bowl” that just happens to not fit in her luggate, so the ever helpful Bridget offers to carry it, and of course, it just happens to be packed solid full of cocaine or heroin or some white powdered drug and of course she is caught at customs and hauled off jail in Thailand where she is not happy, but manages to make friends and pulls together a ridiculous and absurdly unrealistic performance by an entire jail cell of women who join her in a ridiculous rendition of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”, which she performs with her bra on her outershirt, because her “superbra (read Wonderbra) is thrilling and new to the other women in the jail cell.
Does anyone but me see how absurd this whole thing is? And are we really surprised when major spoiler - who else but Mark Darcy shows up and secures Bridget’s improbable freedom because as we find out, Shazzer flew back to England and immediately woke him up and he, in turn, woke up several cabinet ministers and several members of MI5 and other important officials who send him on a world tour to find this Jedd character whom he finally locates somewhere in Saudi Arabia, I believe and from Dubai, has Jedd extradited back to England or somewhere (this part is unclear) where he confesses to everything about the drugs and the snakebowl etc etc and all is well and hooray, our heroine is set free.
I have to say, at this point in the film, all I can manage is a weak “hoorah” or the rallying cry, “blah” because not only has the film insulted me by using the same basic plotline as the first film with some moderation (the awful Thailand thing), but as noted, the same lines are used and even Zellweggers facial expressions and movements at these identical scenes are identical. One wonders why they didn’t just take cuts from the first film – or just reprint it and add the number “2” after it. But ah, they couldn’t do that because somehow, despite the similarities, this film manages to be so much worse. The directors took the big jokes that seemed to have “worked”, amped them up ridiculously and sometimes, offensively and creepily, and lost all the subtleties that made the first film work – like the touching relationship Bridget had with her father, who is essentially nonexistent in this film. Bridget no longer has a family or any real work – those scenes are brief and dull. It’s just one sex-fest between either Mark Darcy or Daniel Cleaver’s attempts and oh, the surprise ending in which we learn that the fabulous and leggy Rebecca (who is, for some reason, at Mark Darcy’s house when Bridget stops by to make up and show her thanks for his setting her free etc etc), we find out that Rebecca or “Becky” is gay after all and has had a thing for Bridget all along. Ahhh…never mind that there were no hints of this or that it seems completely gratuitous other than that it essentially tells us with one HUGE broad stroke, that Mark Darcy has all along been the good guy and couldn’t possibly have cheated with Rebecca because she is, uh, huh, a lesbian. So all of the what-looked-to-be flirting throughout the film is just one big misunderstanding on our, the viewer’s part.
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