Bridget Jones's Baby

Renée's Anatomy

Bridget Jones’s Baby

Grade: B

Director: Sharon Maguire

Starring: Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey and Emma Thompson

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 2 min.

Bookended by a funeral and a wedding, Bridget Jones’s Baby feels like the direct sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary that The Edge of Reason impersonated. Indeed, a late-film flashback chronicling the arc of Bridget (Renée Zellweger) and stodgy “Mawk Dawcy” (Colin Firth) contains no clips from the series’ second film.

Clocking in at just over two hours, Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t adopt the sharp efficiency of Diary. Fortunately, with the return of Diary director Sharon Maguire and an dedicated cast, Baby does replicate the original’s ribald charm and chemistry.

Released 15 years after Diary, Baby retunes its protagonists from 20-something Gen Xers looking for romance to 40-somethings in search of parenthood. Bridget and Mark open the film at the funeral of scalawag Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant, who appears via photo only), the casualty of a mysterious plane crash. Mark is accompanied by Camilla, while Bridget is married only to the wine she imbibes alone that evening for her 43rd birthday.

Bridget and TV anchor gal pal Miranda (Sarah Solemani) go on a weekend of drunken glamping, where Bridget climbs into the yurt of Jack Qwant (Jack Dempsey), a hunky American mogul who has patented an online matchmaking algorithm, a needless plot appendage. Several days after Bridget and Jack shag, Bridget and Mark cross paths again at a christening, where Mark reveals that he’s separated from Camilla. Of course they also end up between the sheets, and a few weeks later Bridget discovers she’s pregnant with uncertain paternity.

Surprisingly, and most welcome, is the fact that both Darcy and McDreamy want to be father and neither are perturbed at Bridget about the predicament. Still, the rest of Bridget Jones’s Baby is the rather predictable course of miscommunications, male posturing and mishaps, culminating with the requisite race to the hospital. There’s about 20 minutes of padding, enlivened mainly by the rapier Brit wit of Emma Thompson, who’s not given nearly enough screen time as Bridget’s droll obstetrician.

The script’s jokes span the spectrum form timely to dated. Bridget’s newsroom is co-opted by new hipster owners sporting beards and man-buns, whose desire to outsource newsgathering to citizens and their camera phones meets with risqué results. On the other hand, the only thing Mark knows about “Gangnam Style” is that it’s a suburb of Seoul, an admittedly amusing payoff to a musty setup.

Otherwise, Bridget Jones’s Baby is a cozy reprise with enough callbacks for fans of the original: Shirley Henderson, Sally Phillips, and James Callis return as Bridget’s buddies; Bridget's daft parents (Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent); even the layout of Bridget’s flat. But it’s the somehow-it-works rapport between Zellweger and Firth that forms the film’s heart and sates the audience’s sense of nostalgia.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Somebody say they needed 1.21 gigawatts?

Grade: D +

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.

The greatest trick Michael Bay ever pulled was making his last Transformers movie so godawful that virtually any follow-up would look superlative by comparison. While Bay excises most (but not all) of the hip-hop “humor” that sullied Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, he amps up the decibels and bumptiousness for Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers 3).

As the film opens, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and the Autobots roam the planet as a phalanx for American foreign policy – we watch them destroy an “illegal nuclear facility” in some nameless Arab country. Meanwhile, Decepticon leader Megatron (Hugh Weaving) has been reduced to a desert-dwelling raghead patiently plotting his next terrorist incursion.

Opportunity comes in the form a Cybertronian ship whose crash landing on the moon in the early 1960s was the actual impetus for the U.S.-Soviet space race (this historical tie-in includes a shuffle-through by Buzz Aldrin himself). Found aboard the craft are a collection of gizmos designed to teleport Cybertron into Earth’s orbit (we never really know why) together with the dormant hulk of former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime, voiced by Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy’s inclusion provides the film’s lone moment of cleverness when a couple of slacker bots watch the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek TV series and, in a bit of foreshadowing, describe it as “the one where Spock goes crazy.”

Once again the Decepticons and their allies threaten mankind while political leaders opt for appeasement, exiling the Autobots and removing their soldiers from the battlefield in hopes that the enemy will just leave them alone. Instead, the Decepticons launch an offensive to secure world domination, headlined by a rampage through downtown Chicago that does more damage to the Windy City than Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Transformers 3 shamelessly assimilates the vernacular and imagery of Sept. 11 (Chi-town is “Ground Zero”), refracted through Bay’s interpretation of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, Holocaust, and Neville Chamberlain. And if toppled skyscrapers aren’t discomforting enough, inexplicable recurring hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) discovers the Decepticons are out to steal your women, too. As Sam’s new girlfriend Carly, ex-Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (subbing for the suddenly sage Megan Fox) primarily sports tight jeans and purses her pursed, collagen-filled lips while standing in front of a green-screen full of explosions and other assorted carnage.

Bay’s literal and figurative flag-waving would be fine if his film was any good. The Bush Doctrine overtones in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films are suitable because they’re packaged in first-rate vehicles. By contrast, Transformers 3 an orgy of dizzying, interminable special effects and right-wing allegory set to Wagneresque blaring brass of composer Steve Jablonsky. You pray for periodic flashes of color in order to tell one shape-shifting robot from another – at one point, four indistinguishable silver robots are caught in a Mexican standoff. Bay’s tone-deaf notion of humor is Sam’s mom taking time during the End of Days to chat with her adult son about how to satisfy a woman.

The rest of the window-dressing is equally vapid and useless. Save for Carly's collaboration with Bay’s leering camera, there’s not a single supporting character whose presence would be missed, but there are a whole lot of actors that should know better. They include a gonzo corporate exec (John Malkovich), a NSA ramrod (Frances McDormand), McDreamy as a car collector (Patrick Dempsey), a crazy Asian (Ken Jeong, natch), a conspiracy nut (John Turturro, again), and invincible super soldiers Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson.

In Bay’s reality, Bill O’Reilly passes for a celebrity cameo and a medal awarded by President Obama for saving the world isn’t enough to get Sam a job as a mail room clerk. “We’re pretty much all Republicans around here,” quips one company headhunter, channeling his director and his loud, jingoistic polemic for neo-con U.S. geopolitics. Transformers 3: Mission not accomplished.

Neil Morris