Nine years after the last movie, and 24 years after the first, Bridget Jones is back (despite being in the age of reboots, I betcha didn’t see that coming, eh?). Though Renée Zellweger returns to play the beloved bumbling British single gal, a lot has happened in the last decade. She’s now the mom of a young son and younger daughter, but lost her husband, Mark Darcy (still played by Colin Firth) on a humanitarian mission. So this time out, Bridget is dealing with being a widow and a single mom. Thankfully, this movie is a positive one as we watch Ms. Jones pick herself and her family up to find her way to happiness again.

Along the way, we get to laugh at how Bridget interacts with other moms at her kids’ fancy private school. There we also get to meet a strict, new science teacher (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor… wink wink). Bridget also goes back to work, and even tries to find love again when she has a meet-cute with a young park ranger (played by Leo Woodall). Pretty soon our girl is back to her old shenanigans, and maybe the decades haven’t really passed by at all.

This movie definitely leans into fan service, calling back to many iconic scenes, bringing back many of the original cast of characters, including all of Bridget’s close friends, her gynaecologist (played again by Emma Thompson), and even her ex love-interest back from the dead (still played charmingly smarmily by rom-com king, Hugh Grant). However, there’s a nostalgia at work as well: that old 90s British rom-com flavour that feels at once heart-warming and dated. (It doesn’t help that obviously everyone has aged — though Zellweger has done it better than most.) Nevertheless, these actors hit their grooves pretty easily and it isn’t long before Bridget has charmed us again.

By the midpoint of the story, when we might start to cover our yawns at having retread this ground so many times, and we start to wonder why we dragged ourselves out for this, the movie actually makes an unexpected pivot. We turn our attentions more to Bridget’s son, Billy, when she joins him on a school trip out to the countryside. We get to see her being more of a mother and also see Billy deal with some of his feelings about the loss of his father. I thought this turn in the film led to a much richer second half. And while I had been ready to dismiss this series’ 4th instalment as a bit unnecessary and gratuitous, I was won over by a nice, sentimental-yet-moving climax.

Over the years I had forgotten how much I enjoyed these types of movies. Though the Bridget Jones movies were not my favourite of the bunch, giving this latest straggler a chance came with the nice reward of recapturing some of those forgotten feelings. (3.5 out of 5)