Bridget Jones: The edge of reason

(Herald rating: ***)

America's sweetheart retreads England's lonely-heart. They take the same route as the first movie, even use some of the same slapstick. Retread? The series should be retired.

Renee Zellweger regains the kilos, slaps on the pancake make-up and resumes the Pommy accent as Bridget, now a cable TV presenter who's somewhat less lonely than in the first outing. Colin Firth is back as Mark Darcy, now her lawyer lover of six weeks but still a buttoned-down charmer; Hugh Grant is slightly recast as Daniel Cleaver, now a TV travel reporter with an eye for the local sights, if they're female.

Expect the expected: Bridget makes an idiot of herself on live TV; Bridget leaves a risque phone message for Mark - on speakerphone in his crowded office; Mark and Daniel throw handbags at one another, again. Oh, and Bridget worries that she'll lose Mark to a beautiful female lawyer, and Daniel will come back on her scene.

This time out, the action leaves London for a European ski resort and a women's prison in Bangkok, for quite superficial reasons. Superficial, even trivial, are the words that stick in the mind after BJ2. Helen Fielding's books, and their situations, are almost 10 years old now; it'd be nice to think that everyone had moved on.

Director Beeban Kidron takes the lead on the DVD, talking frankly on her commentary about recycling old jokes and introducing four deleted scenes. In other features, Zellweger shows she can actually ski in Austria, there's an advertorial piece about Thailand's sights that must have had the local tourist ministry slathering; Firth and Grant come over all mock-macho talking about their "fight" scene and - finally and predictably - a Cosmopolitan-type quiz, Who's Your Ideal Man? Yes, it'd be nice to think everyone had moved on.