Gotta put my hand up and admit it. After watching the trailer for Mad About the Boy, I thought that it would be just another run of the mill English rom-com - enjoyable but nothing really new to write about (pun very much intended). Instead Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy delivers one of the most memorable rom-coms in recent memory. Packed full of joy and a resounding depth, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a perfect rom-com that not only delivers the slap your knee with laughter moments but manages to traverse the stages of grief with humanity and heart. 

 

In Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Bridget is alone once again, widowed four years ago, when Mark was killed on a humanitarian mission in the Sudan. She’s now a single mother to nine-year-old Billy and four-year-old Mabel, and is stuck in a state of emotional limbo, raising her children with help from her loyal friends and even her former lover, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant).

 

Pressured by her Urban Family— Shazzer, Jude and Tom, her work colleague Miranda, her mother, and her gynecologist Dr. Rawlings (Oscar® winner Emma Thompson) — to forge a new path toward life and love, Bridget goes back to work and even tries out the dating apps, where she’s soon pursued by a dreamy and enthusiastic younger man (White Lotus’s Leo Woodall). Now juggling work, home and romance, Bridget grapples with the judgment of the perfect mums at school, worries about Billy as he struggles with the absence of his father, and engages in a series of awkward interactions with her son’s rational-to-a-fault science teacher (Oscar® nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor).

 

The very best rom-coms aren’t some sappy, sickly sweet romance that bears little resemblance to the messiness of love and life. The very best of the genre, the one’s that stick with us and become our comfort films through thick and thin, are those that hold a mirror up to the beautiful yet complicated world of life and love. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy bears this definition beautifully as Bridget travels the many roads of grief while attempting to live once more. 

 

Again, so often in these kind of films there isn’t any real character development. But here we have it in bucket loads from Bridget herself all the way to the thought you really knew him Daniel Cleaver (deliciously and devilishly played by Hugh Grant). After spending time here you will leave the cinema uplifted, sides hurting from laughing too much, and red-eyed from one too many bursts of weeping. This is the kind of rom-coms they used to make - and it’s a welcome return of this mighty genre to the silver screen. 

 

Packed full of joy and a resounding depth, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a perfect rom-com that not only delivers the slap your knee with laughter moments but manages to traverse the stages of grief with humanity and heart.